![]() ![]() So have we always loved drinking to excess? The most likely answer lies in the most aptly named theory in scientific history.Īccording to the this theory, there's a damn good reason our ancestors started drinking well before the evolutionary time line's equivalent of five p.m. And reward means "they had lots of drunken animal sex." A casual look at your city's main drag on a Friday night illustrates the most confusing part of this story: Drunken people aren't good at anything but starting fistfights, puking out of car windows, and having trouble with their erections.Īnd yet alcohol is the one drug we know our primate granddaddies and -mommies were consuming millions of years ago. The obvious question is: W hy did we hold on to this adaptation? The primates who first started using alcohol must've been rewarded for their ability to tolerate it and their desire to seek it out. This means there have been hominids drinking much longer than there have been human beings. ![]() ![]() The enzyme ADH4 is what lets us (and gorillas and monkeys) digest alcohol, and the variation of this enzyme that lets our species appreciate the ethanol in a whiskey sour first showed up around ten million years ago. Our ability to metabolize alcohol, and thus get drunk, originated in some of the very first primates on earth. It's easy to imagine some starving ancient human shoveling a handful of decomposing fruit down his throat and, a few seconds later, realizing he felt fucking excellent.But the story of humankind's introduction to alcohol actually starts much earlier, before anything remotely human ever existed. Here, in an excerpt from Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice (out 8/9), is the story of how alcohol first entered the history of the animal kingdom, long before the first Homo sapien came onstage. Eons before the first brewery, our furry forebearers used alcohol as a cheat code for staying fat and happy. But ten million years ago, for some of our earliest evolutionary ancestors, the smell of fermentation was a signal that fruit was at its ripest and most calorically dense. Looking at the numbers like that, many folks (and several entire religions) wonder if maybe our species wouldn't be better off if we'd never discovered the stuff.īut evaluating alcohol's impact through the lens of evolutionary biology paints a very different picture we might not be here at all if it weren't for the Devil's Bathwater. The CDC estimates this works out to 2.5 million potential years of life lost an average of thirty years cut short per alcohol-related death. Every year, its consumption is responsible for the deaths of around 88,000 people in the U.S. A widely acceptable vice, yes, but still something we're all better off avoiding in excess. By today's Puritanical standards, alcohol is considered a vice. ![]()
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