Early taste for alcohol

THE first alcohol was long thought to have been drunk by neolithic farmers in China 9 000 years ago, when they made the happy discovery that fruit and honey could be fermented into an intoxicating liquor.

But new evidence suggests our ancestors acquired a taste for the substance nearly 10 million years before.

US scientists believe that pretty much as soon as primates left the trees they started scooping up fermented fruit lying on the ground.

Over time their bodies learnt to process the ethanol that gave such windfalls their appealing kick.

Experts studied the gene which produces an enzyme to break down alcohol in the body. They hypothesised the enzyme would not appear until the first alcohol was brewed by early farmers, since it would not have been needed. But researchers were amazed to find it far earlier, near the end of the Miocene epoch.

The discovery could explain why tree-dwelling orangutans cannot metabolise alcohol but chimps can.

“This transition implies that the genomes of modern human, chimpanzee and gorilla began adapting at least 10 million years ago to dietary ethanol present in fermenting fruit,” Professor Matthew Carrigan, of Santa Fe College in the US, said.

“Our ape ancestors gained a digestive enzyme capable of metabolising ethanol near the time they began using the forest floor.”

Any primates unable to digest the fermented fruits would have been likely to have died before passing on their genes. – The Daily Telegraph