Other primates like gorillas, orangutans and gibbons, relish fruits as well. Flowering plants, known botanically as angiosperms, originated about 140 million years ago in the geological period termed the Cretaceous. As yeast cells multiply, the fruit sugar content decreases and ethanol content increases. Our closest cousins – the chimpanzees – spend a lot of time feasting on fruits even today. Stone tools for butchering meat, and animal bones with corresponding cut marks on them, first appear in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago. The birds had become so intoxicated by gorging on the naturally-fermenting berries that alcohol content in the liver of one reached 1,000 parts per million. The ethanol wafting from fermenting fruits may have been a cue to locate sugary rewards in a vast forest. The sugary sap soon ferments into alcohol, which is a popular drink among the locals. It is believed that the nectar contained in bracts and flowers of the traveller's palm ferments. According to Carrigan, who carried out the work on ADH4 enzymes, if this was indeed the case, then aye-ayes might consume alcohol in the wild even today. Many animals, monkeys, pigs, dogs, birds, etc eat fermented fruit and roll about drunk in the wild. Fruit has formed an important part of the primate diet for perhaps 45 million years. The uninvited guests help themselves to the free drinks, with either an individual hogging the jug or two drinking buddies alternating their take, while others wait. But there is one distant primate that acquired the same ADH4 mutation, independent of the lineage that led to us. Do any animals eat marijuana leaves when naturally growing in the wild for same reasons. By looking at the predisposition and defining differences between the natural phenomena and modern practices, Dudley hopes that clinicians can begin to look at alcoholism as a disease of nutritional excess, much like diabetes which would make it treatable by limiting supplies of the addictive nutritional content. His main argument was that our ability to digest alcohol is well-developed today because exposure to alcohol happened early on in our ancestory. I will show you the Monkey eating in my Country. An observation which led Dudley down a path of research that would follow back the evolutionary timeline of our own clade. Those organisms would avoid alcohol because it can impair judgement and is a chemical toxin," says Gochman. Yeast breaks down sugar into alcohol, primarily ethanol – the alcohol in beer and wine. That has been totally missing from the literature on addiction.". Matthew Carrigan of Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, and his team found that a genetic mutation in our evolutionary past made ADH4 40 times better at breaking down ethanol. Watching first-hand as his father descended into the addictive disease, Dudley's first fascinations as a scientist were with what predispositions led to humans' strong attraction to the intoxicating libations. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Another model suggests that human ancestors began consuming alcohol as early as 80 million years ago, when early primates occasionally ate rotting fermented fruit rich in ethanol. The common ape ancestor evolved to carry a protein that made metabolising ethanol more efficient, which allowed them to eat overripe fermented fruits that fell on the ground. They developed such a ⦠For example, hunger associated with alcohol intake and the communal atmosphere that takes place when alcohol lowers inhibitions may have originated in ancient forests over a mid-afternoon meal on abundant fruit. Added to that is the fact that primates had rarely been seen getting wasted on fermented fruits in the wild. Scattered along the jungle floor lie fruits overripe and fallen, sweet with the scent of alcohol. Chimpanzees, like humans, have an efficient form of the ADH4 enzyme to metabolise alcohol, though it varies across populations. ", "They are not drinking down gin and tonics, but they are getting a long, sustained, low-level exposure.". The unripe fruits contain zero ethanol, ripe hanging fruits contain 0.6%, ripe fallen fruits contain 0.9% and over-ripe fallen fruits contain 4.5% ethanol (by weight) on an average. The study authors note that fermentation of vegetables and other foods like dairy was introduced into the human diet during the Neolithic, aka âNew Stone Ageâ. While on an unrelated 5-year-long research stint down into the monkey-filled jungles of Panama, Dudley observed something he had not noted of monkeys and apes in captivity; that they too enjoyed fermented drinks. And even if some of us are teetotallers, our ancestors were probably not. Even though our more recent ancestors moved from a plant- to a meat-based diet about 2.6 million years ago, they continued to eat fruit. It likely belonged to a fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon, the researchers said. The exposure to ethanol would have been minimal for these ancestors as they had access to unfermented fruits, he adds. "The positive psychoactive effects of alcohol may simply exist to enhance the efficacy of these behaviors and ultimately, they are the targets of natural selection.". 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