Alcohol is a definite feature of the human race. We simply drink too much of it, we have huge industries producing bottles by the minute, we have so many different varieties of alcohol that it is just ingrained into our culture. Something most people don’t know about alcohol, though, is that our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, also have an affinity for spirits and inebriants. What is interesting, though, is that we are the only animals to do so, as alcohol is toxic and can even be fatal at instances. Primates and bats, who have predominantly fruit-based diets, have been shown to have the least harmful effects from alcohol.
The reason that we drink alcohol has a long story. Back when the dinosaurs were still around, flowering plants were a new thing, and so were fruits. Now, dinosaurs didn’t like fruits, their digestive systems weren’t built to digest that kind of stuff, so for a while there were no frugivores (fruit-eating animals). 66 million years ago, though, mammals started to climb to avoid dinosaurs. As it turned out, this was also a good way to eat lots of fruit, which are high in nutrients and calories, and that’s how primates evolved. Fruit is high in calories, and therefore supports a tree climbing lifestyle, so primates permanently moved into the trees and didn’t venture onto the ground for a good 50 million years. Since we need to know where the next fruit is and if it is safe to eat, primates evolved highly advanced depth perception and color vision.
During the Miocene epoch around 15 million years ago, the world began to dry up. Jungles starting to slowly disappear, being replaced by thin woodlands and savanna, and fruit trees became rare. In this time, primates would have to settle for what they could get. Most primates started to focus on other food sources, but many would eat fruit when they could get their hands on it. Since fruits ripen and spoil very easily, it was suddenly important that primates be able to digest even spoiled fruit. Spoiled fruit would’ve contained alcohol, and therefore primates evolved alcohol resistance.
Now, chimps and humans were the main primates in Africa that ate fruit, as Africa quickly dried up and turned into savanna. Gorillas had transferred to eating leaves and plants, and so had baboons. However, as fruits became less and less available, both chimps and humans (who had split from each other) switched to more varied food choices, such as meat, plants, nuts, fish, and pretty much everything we eat today. Now, back to chimps drinking alcohol. They don’t just eat spoiled fruits. While this may seem both amusing and terrifying, chimps will raid human villages to take the barrels of booze, during which humans will try to make more booze, which the chimps will then take more of and get wasted, in an oddly hilarious ending to a serious struggle of survival.
Anay Ganesh 