- Our penchant for getting together to drink might stretch back longer than humans have existed.
Somebody taking an embarrassing picture of you while you’re out drinking with your friends is a purely human experience. No other creature on the planet has to live through that humiliation.
Except chimpanzees, apparently.
For the first time ever, a team of researchers has caught chimps on camera while they share fermented fruit with each other. With the chimps huddled around the fruit, it looks astonishingly like a bunch of guys sitting around a bar table.
Although it’s not unusual for animals to unwittingly eat fermented and alcoholic fruit, the chimp’s behavior is unusual. The apes don’t typically share their food — but they seem to do it regularly when it comes to alcoholic fruit.
As this new kind of behavior was just recently observed, researchers aren’t sure what the tendency to share the fermented fruit means. However, they believe that it might be a way to enhance social bonds.
In other words, it’s the equivalent of you going out for a few drinks with your friends to commiserate about life. Chimpanzees truly are more like us than we realize.
Cracking Open a Cold One
The research into chimpanzees and their drinking (or eating, really) habits was carried out by a team led by the University of Exeter. Their results were recently published in the journal Current Biology.
To see what the chimpanzees of the Cantanhez National Park in the small western African country of Guinea-Bissau get up to, the team set up motion-activated cameras in the park’s forests. The video cameras caught behavior nobody had documented before.
The chimpanzees would gather around fallen fruit of the African breadfruit tree. After checking their remnants, the team confirmed that these fruits had begun fermenting and had turned alcoholic.
In the videos, the chimps break the fruits apart. They then pass the pieces around to their friends, like handing out cold ones at a barbecue.
Of course, nature gets crazy, and anything unusual happening once is a coincidence. However, the researchers saw the chimps repeat this communal feasting on 10 occasions.
Strange for Chimps
Alright, so the apes passed a bunch of fruit around. What’s the big deal?
Well, it’s weird because chimpanzees don’t tend to share their meals.
“Chimps don’t share food all the time, so this behavior with fermented fruit might be important,” Dr. Kimberley Hockings from the University of Exeter said in a statement.
Additionally, the fact that the fruit was alcoholic is another oddity. Animals don’t tend to intentionally get drunk (with some exceptions), as being drunk is a great way to get killed out in nature.
Now, the breadfruits aren’t exactly tequila. According to the researchers, the highest measured level of alcohol in the fruit was 0.61% ABV — as much as there may be in your breakfast OJ.
As such, it’s unlikely the chimpanzees are aiming to get drunk. That said, they do subsist mostly on fruit, and having multiple low-alcohol snacks during the day could add up.
What’s more, we don’t know how alcohol affects chimpanzees. Maybe they are real lightweights, and the breadfruit is enough to get buzzed.
Biologically Hard-wired to Get Drunk
Considering that the chimps seem to specifically seek out fermented breadfruit for sharing, they appear to be aware that they contain a small amount of alcohol. The next question, then, is why they would share this treat instead of boozing it up on their own.
Surprisingly, the answer might be the same as to why friends go out drinking.
“For humans, we know that drinking alcohol leads to a release of dopamine and endorphins, and resulting feelings of happiness and relaxation,” explained Anna Bowland from Exeter’s Center for Ecology and Conservation.
“We also know that sharing alcohol — including through traditions such as feasting — helps to form and strengthen social bonds.”
It could be that the chimps share the boozy fruit for the same reason. After a long day of climbing in the trees, they simply want to kick back with their buddies and have a bite of alcoholic fruit.
If so, that would reveal something new about the behavior of chimpanzees — and us humans.
“We need to find out more about whether they deliberately seek out ethanolic fruits and how they metabolize it, but this behavior could be the early evolutionary stages of ‘feasting,’” mused Dr. Hockings.
“If so, it suggests the human tradition of feasting may have its origins deep in our evolutionary history,” she added.
In other words, this discovery might show that getting hammered with your friends is a tradition older than humanity itself.