Drunken monkey hypothesis proposes that human attraction to

ethanol Ethanol (abbr. EtOH; also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol) is an organic compound. It is an alcohol with the chemical formula . Its formula can be also written as or (an ethyl group linked to a ...

may derive from dependence of the

primate Primates are a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians ( monkeys and apes, the latter including ...

ancestors of ''

Homo sapiens Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...

'' on ripe and

fermenting Fermentation is a metabolic process that produces chemical changes in organic substrates through the action of enzymes. In biochemistry, it is narrowly defined as the extraction of energy from carbohydrates in the absence of oxygen. In food p ...

fruit as a dominant food source.''The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol'', University of California Press, 154 pp., 2014. Ethanol naturally occurs in ripe and overripe fruit when yeasts ferment sugars, and consequently early primates (and many other fruit-eating animals) have evolved a genetically based behavioral attraction to the molecule. This hypothesis was originally proposed by Robert Dudley of the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

, and was the subject of a symposium at the 2004 annual meeting of the

Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is organized to integrate the many fields of specialization which occur in the broad field of biology.. The society was formed in 1902 as the American Society of Zoologists, through the merger of ...

. His book ''The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol'' was published in 2014 by the University of California Press. Dudley suggests that, whereas most addictive substances have a relatively short history of human use, attraction to and consumption of ethanol by various primates may go back tens of millions of years. The odors of ripening fruit would help primates find scarce calories in tropical rain forests, given that ethanol is a relatively light molecule and is moved rapidly by winds through vegetation. This once-beneficial attraction to and consumption of ethanol at low concentrations may underlie modern human tendencies for alcohol use and alcohol abuse.

References

External links

2014 review
of the drunken monkey hypothesis
2014 PNAS article
reconstructing ancestral hominid enzymes involved in metabolism of dietary ethanol
2008 PNAS paper
showing natural attraction of the slow loris and pen-tailed treeshrew to fermenting nectar
Laboratory of Professor Robert Dudley
at the University of California, Berkeley {{Human Evolution Alcohol abuse Human evolution