Chimpanzees that live in the wild don’t disgust a shot , according to a study published by the Royal Society Open Science . Researchers have tracked the behavior of apes and collected data between 1995 and 2012 in the town of Boussou, in Guinea, whose inhabitants make palm wine.
To obtain it, they collect the sweet sap of raffia, a type of palm, by clicking on the tree to collect the liquid in a plastic container. The villagers carry out this operation twice a day, and with the fermented sap they make the wine. Well, chimpanzees not only steal a part of the alcoholic drink from them, but they drink it with a “glass” and everything: they chew some leaves to fold them, and use them to collect the concoction and suck them, a method that used to consume other liquids.
This is the first study to show that primates take an alcoholic preparation voluntarily and repeatedly and confirms that African great apes and humans share a genetic mutation that allows us to efficiently metabolize alcohol. For Kimberley Hockings, from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, who has led the study, supports the idea that the last common ancestor of the great African apes and Homo sapiens had no aversion to ingesting alcoholic liquids.
During the period in which the researchers observed the behavior of the monkeys, they found that of the 26 Bossou chimpanzees that make up the group, 13 consumed the fermented drink, which contains an amount of ethanol between 3.1% and 6, 9% ”, graduation similar to beer. And of course, some showed clear “signs of drunkenness.”
