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Chimps' taste for fermented fruit hints at the origins of humans' love of alcohol

NPR Topics: News·@AriDaniel·2 months ago
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Ari Daniel Researchers collected and analyzed urine from chimpanzees in a Ugandan forest after they'd eaten fermented fruit to determine how much alcohol they'd consumed. Sharifah Namaganda hide caption For 11 days in late summer 2025, Aleksey Maro found himself in the Ugandan rainforest, doing whatever he could to collect chimpanzee urine. "The most consistent, predictable time is in the morning. Just like people, the first thing they do when they wake up is they go pee," says Maro, a Ph.D. student in integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Now, in a study published recently in Biology Letters, Maro and his colleagues explained what those urine samples reveal: Chimpanzees appear to consume a fair amount of alcohol when eating ripe, fermenting fruit. The findings may tell us something about human evolution.…

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