Monkeys Routinely Eat Fruit Containing Alcohol, Shedding Light On Our Own Taste For Booze

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In 2014, biologist Robert Dudley proposed the drunken monkey hypothesis, which posits that humans like alcohol because ancient ancestors sought out ripe fermented nutritious fruit. Although monkeys (our closest relatives) eat fermented fruit, it’s only been recently observed that they seek it out without human intervention. The study followed spider monkeys on Barro Colorado island in Panama who routinely sniffed out and ate fruit from the jobo tree with 1-2% alcohol content; the same fruit is used by indigenous people to make the alcoholic drink chicha. Read full article here

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