Authors
  Dudley R.
Title
  Fermenting fruit and the historical ecology of ethanol ingestion: is
  alcoholism in modern humans an evolutionary hangover?
Source
  Addiction. 97(4):381-388, 2002 Apr.
Abstract
  In the field of addiction research, the possibility of ancestral exposure
to psychoactive compounds has generally been excluded. A paleobiological
approach to the human diet, however, illustrates the potential utility of
historical data in interpreting modern-day addictive behaviors. Low-level
dietary exposure to ethanol via ingestion of fermenting fruit has probably
characterized the predominantly frugivorous anthropoid lineage for about 40
million years. Potentially adaptive primate behaviors associated with the
natural occurrence of ethanol include the olfactory use of ethanol   plumes
to localize fruit crops, the use of ethanol as an appetitive   stimulant to
facilitate rapid consumption of transient nutritional   resources, and the
physiological exploitation of the caloric benefits of ethanol. Such
behavioral and energetic advantages probably pertain to all animal taxa that
consume fermenting fruit, and may have been retained in modern humans in
spite of considerable dietary diversification over the last several million
years. In contemporary human environments, excessive consumption of ethanol
would then represent maladaptive cooption of ancestrally advantageous
behaviors given essentially ad libitum access to a compound otherwise found
only within scarce nutritional substrates.

Epidemiologically demonstrated health benefits of low-level alcohol
consumption are consistent with an ancient and potentially adaptive
exposure of primate frugivores to this most common of the psychoactive
substances. [References: 62]

  Reprint available from:
  Dudley R
  Univ Texas, Sect Integrat Biol
  Austin, TX 78712
  USA

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