{"id":39814,"date":"2025-04-22T01:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T01:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/39814\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T01:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T01:39:10","slug":"scientists-filmed-wild-chimpanzees-sharing-alcohol-laced-fermented-fruit-for-the-first-time-and-it-looks-eerily-familiar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/39814\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists filmed wild chimpanzees sharing alcohol-laced fermented fruit for the first time and it looks eerily familiar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chimpanzees <\/a>Chimpanzees sharing fermented fruit. Credit: Bowland et al.<\/p>\n

In the lush canopies of Guinea-Bissau\u2019s Cantanhez National Park, a group of wild chimpanzees has been caught in a moment that\u2019s oddly familiar: eating and sharing fruit laced with alcohol.<\/p>\n

For the first time, researchers have filmed chimpanzees in the wild sharing fermented African breadfruit, which contains ethanol. The footage was gathered over months using motion-activated cameras and captures something quintessentially human: sharing a mild buzz with the boys.<\/p>\n

A Primate\u2019s Toast<\/p>\n

The scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK documented ten separate instances of chimps consuming the naturally fermented fruit. Tests revealed the alcohol content reached as high as 0.61% ABV \u2014 less than a weak beer, but still enough to raise eyebrows.<\/p>\n

Like humans, chimps have a taste for alcohol. In 2015, for instance, researchers spotted<\/a> wild chimps guzzling wine not once, not twice, but 51 times over the course of a 17-year study in the village of Bossou in Guinea. The chimps seek out raffia palms, a plant that produces a tree sap that naturally ferments into wine. Villagers in Bossou traditionally leave containers out in the morning at the crown of the trees for the sap to drip into throughout the day.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

An adult male chimpanzee named Foaf uses a leaf tool to drink raffia sap from a container. Holding the leaf tool, Foaf dips his hand into the fermented palm sap container and retrieves the soaked leaf. He then transfers it to his mouth to drink the palm sap it\u2019s carrying. Miho Nakamura, Wildlife Research Center, Kyoto University, Japan<\/strong>\u00a0YouTube<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, what fascinates the researchers of the new study isn\u2019t the consumption behavior itself. The chimpanzees didn\u2019t just eat the intoxicating fruit. They shared it.<\/p>\n

\u201cChimps don\u2019t share food all the time, so this behaviour with fermented fruit might be important,\u201d said Dr. Kimberley Hockings, a primatologist at the University of Exeter. \u201cWe need to find out more about whether they deliberately seek out ethanolic fruits and how they metabolise it, but this behaviour could be the early evolutionary stages of \u2018feasting\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an interesting thought that might be more consequential than it meets the eye. If these gatherings over mildly alcoholic fruit represent a kind of proto-feast, they may echo deep evolutionary roots. It could suggest that our own social rituals involving alcohol could trace back millions of years.<\/p>\n

An Ancient Tradition?<\/p>\n

\"chimpanzees <\/a>Two adult females feed on a remnant of fermented African breadfruit. Credit: Bowland et al.<\/p>\n

The idea that early humans evolved alongside \u2014 and sometimes thanks to \u2014 the presence of ethanol in ripe and fermented fruits isn\u2019t new. The \u201cdrunken monkey hypothesis,\u201d<\/a> proposed by biologist Robert Dudley, suggests that our primate ancestors may have developed a taste for ethanol-rich fruit<\/a>, and with it, the ability to metabolize alcohol.<\/p>\n

That adaptation may not be exclusive to us. \u201cRecent discoveries of a molecular adaptation that greatly increased ethanol metabolism in the common ancestor of African apes suggests eating fermented fruits may have ancient origins in species including humans and chimps,\u201d the researchers noted.<\/p>\n

\"chimpanzees <\/a>Two adult males feed on fermented African breadfruit. Credit: Bowland et al.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor humans, we know that drinking alcohol leads to a release of dopamine and endorphins, and resulting feelings of happiness and relaxation,\u201d said Anna Bowland of Exeter\u2019s Centre for Ecology and Conservation. \u201cWe also know that sharing alcohol \u2014 including through traditions such as feasting \u2014 helps to form and strengthen social bonds.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, could chimpanzees be feeling something similar?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a difficult question to answer definitively. The researchers stress that the alcohol levels found in the fruit are relatively low, and chimps aren\u2019t likely to get drunk in the way humans do. Intoxication, after all, doesn\u2019t lend itself well to survival in the wild.<\/p>\n

Still, given that fruit makes up 60\u201385% of a chimpanzee\u2019s diet, even small amounts of ethanol could accumulate. What\u2019s more, if chimps are choosing fermented fruit over fresh alternatives \u2014 and sharing it \u2014 they may be doing more than just foraging. They may be bonding.<\/p>\n

A Forest Cocktail Party<\/p>\n

The discovery blurs yet another line between humans and our closest living relatives. It hints at the possibility that some of the social behaviors we think of as uniquely human \u2014 sharing drinks, holding feasts, forming rituals around food \u2014 are much more ancient than we thought. They might originate in the treetops of West Africa.<\/p>\n

It also raises new questions. Do chimps actively seek out fermented fruit? Do they feel the effects? Could their brains, like ours, respond to ethanol with a dose of pleasure?<\/p>\n

For now, these remain open mysteries. But one thing is clear: the seeds of our own evolutionary story are still bearing fruit \u2014 sometimes fermented, and sometimes shared \u2014 in the forests where our cousins live.<\/p>\n

The findings appeared in the journal Current Biology. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chimpanzees sharing fermented fruit. Credit: Bowland et al. In the lush canopies of Guinea-Bissau\u2019s Cantanhez National Park, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[785,22658,22659,70,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-39814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-alcohol","9":"tag-chimpanzee","10":"tag-chimps","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114379067573676189","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}