I’ve heard about this phenomenon before, though not in this context. But it makes sense that ancient apes’ alcohol experiences and a single-gene selection could be what makes humans able to tolerate alcohol at all…
“Three pints? At lunchtime?” “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so…”
Ancient apes – like our contemporary wild cousins – regularly ate windfall fruits from the forest floor that had started to ferment.
I giggle at the image of a modern-day chimpanzee walking into a bar, scowling, and telling the bar-tender: “Rotten apples, George. And keep ’em coming!” But that’s about what it amounts to.
Common behaviour
“Scrumping” is the name coined in a paper led by researchers at Dartmouth and the University of St Andrews in Scotland for the fondness apes have for eating ripe fruit from the forest floor. These pri-mates’ palate for picked-up produce has taken on new importance in recent years, the researchers report in the journal BioScience.
The researchers write that geneticists reported, in a 2015 study, that eating fermented fruit may have triggered a single amino acid change in the last common ancestor of humans and African apes that boosted their ability to metabolize alcohol by 40 times.
A fascinating idea…
“It’s a fascinating idea,” says Nathaniel Dominy, the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth and a corresponding author of the ‘scrumping’ paper. “But nobody studying these ape species, or Asian apes, had the data to test it. It just wasn’t on our radar.”
“It’s not that primatologists have never seen scrumping. They observe it pretty regularly,” Dominy says. “But the absence of a word for it has disguised its importance. We’re hoping to fill an important void in scientific discourse.”
Scrumping, the researchers write, is the English form of the medieval German word ‘schrimpen’, a noun meaning ‘shriveled’ or ‘shrunken’ used to describe overripe or fermented fruit. In England to-day, ‘scrumpy’ is a noun that refers to a cloudy apple cider with an alcohol by volume content that ranges from 6 to 9 percent.
What they found
Scrumping was previously known to be indulged in regularly by great apes including gorillas, chim-panzees and other primates who are closely related to humans. Orangutans and other primates not so closely related to us don’t have the specific genetic mutation scientists believe is responsible for our love of booze.
The takeaway
“Scrumping by the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans about 10 million years ago could explain why humans are so astoundingly good at digesting alcohol,” Dominy says. “We evolved to metabolize alcohol long before we ever figured out how to make it, and making it was one of the major drivers of the Neolithic Revolution that turned us from hunter-gatherers into far-mers and changed the world.”
My take
For me… This whole saga gives all-new significance to the ancient scribes’ concept of being, “at a loss for words.” I believe Dominy is correct when he suggests being at a loss for an agreed-on word or term to describe something can also result in being at loss for the depth and nuance of meaning needed to discuss it at a given level.
Bonus points to Dominy and his colleagues who came up with the term ‘scrumping’. Which, in turn, allowed them to develop their theory of how eating rotting fruit off the ground became, “one of the major drivers of the Neolithic Revolution that turned us from hunter-gatherers into farmers and changed the world.”
~ Maggie J.