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Humans love booze because our monkey ancestors were all getting drunk on rotten fruit
alcohol.The “drunken monkey” theory is based on modern day apes who seek out over-ripe fermented fruit for the alcohol.Researchers believed that the smell of alcohol led our ancestors to ripe and nutritious fruit millions of years ago.Although just a theory when it was first proposed by University of California Berkley biologist Professor Robert Dudley in 2014, new evidence amongst modern monkeys seems to support it.The latest study by primatologist Professor Christina Campbell of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), looked at fruit collected from black-handed spider monkeys in Panama.Along with her team, they found the alcohol content in the ripened fruit discarded was typically between 1-2% by volume, about half the strength of beer.Researchers collected urine from these free-ranging monkeys and found it contained secondary metabolites of alcohol. This result shows that the animals were actually using the alcohol for energy - it wasn’t just passing through their bodies.
