A new study, published in the journal BioScience, suggests that we owe our ability to metabolise alcohol to our great ape ancestors’ penchant for feasting on fallen, fermented fruit.
It’s known that humans and other African great apes, such as gorillas and chimps, have a mutation in a gene, called alcohol dehydrogenase 4 (ADH4), that makes them good at breaking down alcohol. Compared with orangutans and other primates which lack the mutation, they are forty times better at metabolising booze.
Genetic studies have shown that this mutation was present in the last common ancestor of African apes, which lived around 6 million years ago, prompting researchers to wonder if African apes – past and present - ingest alcohol in the form of fallen, fermented fruits.
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Scrabbling around for a term to describe the behaviour, the researchers, from the University of St. Andrews and Dartmouth College drew a blank. “Nobody wants more jargon,” they wrote in their paper, “but sometimes we need a new word to capture a fundamental concept.”
So, they settled on ‘scrumping,’ an English derivation of the Middle Low German word schrimpen, meaning ‘shrivelled’, and a medieval noun that describes overripe fruit.
While searching for the right term, they discovered many examples of gothic art which show primates eating fallen fruit, including one carved into the base of a pillar on Chartres Cathedral.
Spurred on, they delved into their behavioural database to assess what proportion of fruits, consumed by great apes, are handpicked from the trees versus scrumped from the ground.
Mountain gorillas, western gorillas and chimpanzees scrumped between a quarter and two thirds of their fruits. Whilst orangutans, which do not carry the alcohol-metabolising gene variant, scrumped less than one per cent.
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So, the hypothesis that emerges is that ancient African apes scrumped alcohol-laced fruit because it was calorie dense, meant they didn’t have to use energy climbing trees and because their genetics meant ‘they could handle it.’ Fast forward to present day, and although we may not scrump for fallen fruits likes chimps, we do drink cider!
As Catherine Hobaiter, one of the lead authors on the study says, “one upshot is that sharing a cold pint of scrumpy this summer echoes a behaviour our ape ancestors might have already been partaking in 10 million years ago.”
Find out more about the study: Fermented fruits: scrumping, sharing, and the origin of feasting
Top image: chimpanzee eating fermenting fruit. Credit: Catherine Hobaiter/University of St Andrews
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