Gorillas on the Piss?

Wild chimps get up to 14g ethanol per day from fruit, the equivalent of a stubby of VB or a margarita. Drunkie monkey? Not really.

A cheeky starter

Strictly speaking, we are talking about chimps, not gorillas, smashing back fermented fruit. A study in Science Advances reveals wild chimpanzees in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire routinely ingest the equivalent of a drink or two every day through their fruit diet.

Media headlines love “beer-drinking apes,” but the truth is subtler, and far more intriguing.

Jungle juice

Researchers measured the ethanol in the fruit chimps gobbled down. Each piece held about 0.3 percent ethanol, multiplied by several kilos of fruit, totalling around 14 grams ethanol per day.

To put that in human terms, it is the equivalent of a stubby of VB or a margarita, depending on your taste.

Because chimps graze throughout the day, their alcohol intake is spread out. The result is no signs of drunkenness, just steady, low-level exposure built into their daily diet.

“We hypothesize that they may assess whether to eat a fruit based partly on its ethanol aroma.”— Aleksey Maro, Lead Author and Primatologist, UC Berkeley

Who’s a drunkey monkey then?

These findings revive the “drunken monkey hypothesis.” Our primate ancestors had regular, low-dose alcohol exposure from fermented fruit long before brewing and distilling began.

If wild animals are already ingesting alcohol, then it is not purely a human invention.

Perhaps alcohol is less a human creation and more a feature of the primate environment. The evolutionary roots of our taste and metabolism might run deeper than we think.

Contesting the beery theory

Not everyone is convinced. Fermentation may progress after fruit is collected, which could skew measurements. Researchers are unsure whether chimps seek high-ethanol fruit or simply eat what is available. The long-term effects of this low-dose exposure remain unclear.

Are there subtler shifts in cognition, reproduction, or ageing that go undetected? The evolutionary implications are enticing, but still speculative.

Lets get chimp-faced

And no, elephants are not lurching about drunk on marula fruit. That story’s a myth; researchers have shown they would need to eat impossible amounts to feel any alcohol effect.

However, other animals don't seem to mind a tipple: treeshrews use fermented palm nectar nightly, bats tolerate low-alcohol fruit just fine, spider monkeys show ethanol metabolites in their urine, and chimps have even been spotted using leafy sponges to drink palm sap.

Surely when you see a fellow chimp soaking up palm sap with a sponge, a real friend says, "Buddy, it's over"?

Last drinks!

Gorillas are not stumbling through the forest clutching pints. Chimpanzees, our closest cousins, quietly sip fermented fruit every day.

Our relationship with alcohol might not be a modern quirk. Is it an inherited taste, an evolutionary echo that still shapes us?

Bottoms up!

Adam S