It appears that our ancestors began to drink alcohol – without getting sick from moderate amounts – about 10 million years ago. New evidence puts the date much further back than previously thought, with some anthropologists having suggested 9,000 years ago, when humans began to ferment food.
Researchers, led by Matthew Carrigan from the University of New Mexico, last week reported there is now evidence that some primates developed a form of the ADH4 protein that oxidizes ethanol much earlier. Their paper, in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) notes:
Paleogenetics is an emerging field that resurrects ancestral proteins from now-extinct organisms to test, in the laboratory, models of protein function based on natural history and Darwinian evolution … The evolving catalytic properties of these resurrected enzymes show that our ape ancestors gained a digestive dehydrogenase enzyme capable of metabolizing ethanol near the time that they began using the forest floor, about 10 million years ago.”
An explanation of the research work, aimed at a more general public is available on ScienceMag.
Hi Ellen
Nice story but your title, though appealing, is a bit misleading. Our primate ancestors did not “drink” alcohol, they only adapted to highly fermented fruits that spontaneously occur in nature (see this funny clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E5TjkDvU0). Therefore we Homo sapiens indeed began to drink alcohol only ca. 9,000-10’000 years ago.
Kind regards
José Vouillamoz
José, I’m chuckling over semantics here. I agree, and I was being a bit naughty with that title. But there is a semantics question: do we need vessels to drink, or is it a question of the consistency – if those highly fermented and presumably somewhat rotting fruits were turning to liquid, weren’t they drinking alcohol? One of the interesting points for me in the research is the Darwinian aspect, survival of the “fittest”, in this case fit = those who could digest alcohol, so booze held some appeal besides just the high (as in, not getting sick).