We've all heard of a chimps' tea party, but researchers studying the primates in West Africa have found they may actually prefer a glass of wine or two (or three, or four...).
A 17-year-long study in the Bossou region of Guinea, published in Royal Society Open Science, has recorded the chimpanzees using sponges made of crushed leaves to drink fermented palm sap. Indeed, some of them were even found to drink to the point of being visibly inebriated.
The team, led by primatologist Kimberley Hockings from Oxford Brookes University, used video cameras to observe a troop of 26 wild chimps between 1995 and 2012. Local villagers in the same area harvest a sweet, frothy wine -- which can have an alcohol content of up to 6.9 percent -- from the raffia palm trees, tapping the crown and gathering the naturally fermented sap in plastic containers.
Hockings and her team soon found that the chimps followed suit, using their own canny techniques. The primates fashioned "leaf sponges" from handfuls of chewed leaves, which they then used to dip into the sap and suck out the boozy contents.
All in all, the researchers recorded 20 of these group "drinking sessions", involving 13 young male and female chimps -- though the other apes remained teetotal for the whole period. Some of the drinking chimps were even found to get more than a little tipsy.
," Hockings commented, "the equivalent to 8.5 UK units" -- around a bottle of wine. The apes also showed "behavioural signs of inebriation" after drinking, including falling asleep and restlessness.
Although there have been unconfirmed reports of non-human primates consuming ethanol in the wild previously, the study marks the first time that voluntary alcohol consumption has been recorded in apes.
The findings lend further weight to the "drunken monkey theory": that apes and humans share a genetic ability to break down alcohol, inherited from a common ancestor.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
