Chimpanzees are a lot like people. They have big brains, no tails, and DNA that is 98.8% identical to ours. They also like to get a little tipsy, according to new research from UC Berkeley scientists.
A study published last week in the respected Science Advances journal found that wild chimps consume more than two drinks worth of alcohol per day by eating fruit. It’s the first study to measure chimps’ ethanol consumption, and much remains unknown: how chimps process alcohol, for instance, or how it affects them. (Researchers noted that the chimpanzees they studied were not visibly wasted.)
Despite these unanswered questions, the study did buoy the “drunken monkey” hypothesis, which posits that humans inherited a thirst for booze from our primate forefathers.
Scientists believe that our common ancestor with chimpanzees had a pretty similar diet to modern chimps: mostly fruit. But these prehistoric apes weren’t seeking out fermented bananas to release their social inhibitions.
More likely, they developed a taste for overripe fruit because it’s sweeter, and thus has a higher caloric value. The theory holds that this is why an appetite for alcohol persists among humans today.
Fast forward 300,000 years, and chimps are still getting loose in the traditional fashion — but some homo sapiens have abandoned their roots. Instead of maintaining a light buzz throughout the day, young people in San Francisco are working “996" schedules, lifting weights in the Spartan apartments where they work, and abstaining from alcohol altogether.
One grindset-pilled founder, Roy Lee of Cluely, told The Standard in July that such an arrangement was the most natural thing in the world.
“Humans are biologically primed to live in a group, hunt with each other, and work together,” he said.
The chimp study published in Science Advances presents a compelling counterargument: humans are biologically primed to hang out with their friends and be sort of drunk all day.