Monkeys routinely consume fruit containing alcohol, shedding light on our own taste for booze.
For 25 years, UC Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley has been intrigued by humans’ love of alcohol. In 2014, he wrote a book proposing that our attraction to booze arose millions of years ago, when our ape and monkey ancestors discovered that the scent of alcohol led them to ripe, fermenting, and nutritious fruit.
A new study now supports this idea, which Dudley calls the “drunken monkey” hypothesis.
The study was led by primatologist Christina Campbell of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and her graduate student Victoria Weaver, who collected fruit eaten and discarded by black-handed spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) in Panama. They found that the alcohol concentration in the fruit was typically between 1% and 2% by volume, a by-product of natural fermentation by yeasts that eat sugar in ripening fruit.
Moreover, the researchers collected urine from these free-ranging monkeys and found that the urine contained secondary metabolites of alcohol. This result shows that the animals were actually utilizing the alcohol for energy — it wasn’t just passing through their bodies.
Today, the availability of alcohol in liquid form, without the gut-filling pulp of fermenting fruit, means it’s easy to overindulge. The idea that humans’ natural affinity for alcohol is inherited from our primate ancestors could help society deal with the adverse consequences of alcohol abuse.
“Excessive consumption of alcohol, as with diabetes and obesity, can then be viewed conceptually as a disease of nutritional excess,” Campbell said.
This hypothesis triggered my genetic memory, which had me daydreaming about the days when our ancestors would swim on the bottom of the ocean floor sucking up shark shit.
In fact, the name of this blog is a commemoration to our aquatic cousins the carp. Without them, you wouldn't be able to read ideas on the internet. Without the carp, we would still be monkeys. Or wait, maybe it's without the monkeys we would still be vultures. I forget. Anyway, without our cousins the carp, we definitely wouldn't have developed a "drunken monkey hypothesis" to explain why humans like to drink alcohol. That much is for sure.
In all honesty, these two women are absolute pioneers in the realm of thought. I mean, how brilliant of them to come up with the idea to examine the urine of spider monkeys while on vacation in Panama and then be able to formulate the opinion that spider monkeys obtained energy from rotten fruit.
This is a perfect example of why feminism is such a vital asset to WestCiv. If these women were at home cooking dinner for their children, they would have never been able to go to Panama and study spider monkey urine. And if they hadn't had the free time to go to Panama to study spider monkey urine, then we would never know why humans like to booze it up while watching black men run with a ball on the weekends.
You really just have to give it up to these ladies. Pardon me, these geniuses (no reason to mention their gender; we were all evolved equally).
This is the kind of Science! that paves the way for the future. Now that we realize that alcoholism in humans is just an evolutionary adaptation from our spider monkey ancestors - who ate rotten fruit to obtain energy; not to get drunk - we can quit thinking that alcoholics are a product of a nihilistic society. Then we wouldn't have to pretend that alcoholics are simply trying to escape their perpetual state of misery, rather that they've just taken their nutrition to excess. You know, like when a kid eats too much candy on Halloween. Or when a dog eats itself to death.
Since we know that the love of alcohol is written in our DNA (the DNA that we inherited from spider monkeys, not carp), we can treat any health problems that arise from excessive alcohol consumption as a nutritional disease. Maybe big pharma can develop a pill, or mRNA injection that acts like a diet drug or something. Perhaps they could test it out on spider monkeys in the jungles of Panama. Wait, that might be some kind of PETA violation, so scratch that. They can just do human trials.
Hopefully some female college students will eventually discover that rampant drug use is actually encoded in our DNA from some other species. For example, maybe our rodent ancestors ingested coca leaves as a survival mechanism, which would explain the crackhead phenomenon. They could even call it the "crackhead rodent hypothesis." The theory could be that rats who stayed awake longer after ingesting coca leaves had larger food caches, which enabled them to survive times of food shortages.
Obviously, "crackhead rodent hypothesis" is theoretically inferior to "drunken monkey hypothesis," because two college women actually studied spider monkey urine in the jungles of Panama in order to come up with "drunken monkey hypothesis." And I'm just spontaneously making stuff up on the internet while drinking beer.
Cheers!
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