When Did Primates Learn To Metabolize Alcohol? A Chemist Reenacts Drunk History
Go Home Chimp, You Are Drunk wwarby via FlickrAccording to this laboratory study, the desire for a stiff drink could go further back than we think. Humans have been fermenting alcoholic beverages since as early as 10,000 B.C., but we've probably enjoyed the effects of natural fermentation much longer than that. Our ability to digest alcohol might have sprung from a primate ancestor that ate fermenting fruits, a new theory suggests. Humans metabolize the ethanol in alcoholic drinks thanks to enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenase 4, or ADH4. Other primates have ADH4 enzymes, but not all can metabolize ethanol. To analyze how ethanol digestion changed over time, Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, built enzymes in the lab that estimated how extinct primates metabolized alcohol. Benner and his colleagues looked at the DNA stretches responsible for ADH4 in 27 modern primates. Using lemurs, monkeys,...