If you’ve ever brunched on a Sunday, you may have wondered what it is about alcohol that folks love so much. It is, after all, kind of weird to drink the juice of grapes that have been sitting so long that they’ve actually fermented. Well, it turns out that human’s love of booze might not be a sign of sophistication or sedation — as some would have us believe. Instead, the human love of alcohol may stem from our primate roots.
A study released last month in the British medical journal Royal Society Open Science, proposes that our love of alcohol started millions of years ago when our primate ancestors learned that the scent of alcohol meant ripe fruit. In case you aren’t aware, when fruit gets very ripe, it ferments naturally and becomes alcoholic. The theory that monkeys eating fermented fruit led to our love of booze is called the “drunken monkey” hypothesis, according to EurekAlert. Researchers have been trying to prove that this hypothesis is true for decades, but this study is one of the first to back it up.
