When chimpanzees eat ripe figs and other fruits in the wild, it’s a surprisingly boozy feast—the fruit they consume in a day contains the equivalent of a couple of adult beverages. That’s the upshot of a new study on the alcohol content of the preferred foods of one of our closest living relatives. The findings, published today in the journal Science Advances, may have implications for understanding human attraction to alcohol.
Chimpanzees are well known to be fruit lovers. In chimp communities in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire, fruit makes up around 75 percent of their diet; scientists have documented the animals eating an estimated 10 pounds of fruit a day on average. Consumption derives from ancestral exposure to this psychoactive substance among frugivorous primates,” Maro and his collaborators conclude in their paper.
Source:
