What if Humans - and Other Animals - are Hard-Wired to Enjoy Alcohol?

A growing range of research suggests that ethanol is part of the diet of a wide range of the creatures with whom we share this planet.

Image: Midjourney AI

As the brilliant Anne Roe noted in the obituary she wrote about him for The Economist, the archeologist Patrick McGovern who died on August 24^th, aged 89, “began to realise that human progress was tightly tied to alcohol” when he tested the residues in ancient pots. McGovern who sported an Indiana Jones hat and a beard of which a Greek philosopher might have been proud, is best known in the wine world for his work on 8,000 year old qvevri amphora in Georgia.

He was, however, not fixated on fermented grape juice; his interest was in all kinds of alcohol enjoyed by our distant ancestors, including the ones neolithic man, like modern South Americans, produced by chewing grains to convert their starch into sugar.

No beer, no Pyramids?

McGovern was fascinated by the four or five litres of beer the builders of the Pyramids were given every day. The ale, he thought, might have been even more vital to them than the bread produced using the same yeasts. “You needed bread to exist; you needed alcohol to enjoy existing… Exploration, experiment, even the basic wish to socialise and produce offspring, were spurred by drinking something fermented.”

The archeologist’s theory was supported by work conducted by researchers from the University of Liverpool, Maastricht University and King’s College London, and included among this year’s Ig Nobel Awards. These prizes have been awarded annually for 35 years, in the words of the organisers, to “honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK”. In this case, the study involved testing to see whether a limited amount of alcohol improved subjects’ ability to speak a foreign language.

The participants were German students who had learned to speak Dutch and were asked to have a drink before chatting in this new acquired language to a researcher. Some were given alcohol - the equivalent of a pint of 5% beer for a 70kg adult, adjusted to their body weight - while others were served a placebo. When recordings of their efforts were played to a couple of native Dutch speakers, it was clear to them that the students who had imbibed showed better pronunciation than the involuntary teetotallers.

Dr Jessica Werthmann, one of the researchers uncontroversially suggested that “One possible mechanism could be the anxiety-reducing effect of alcohol” but noted that “more research is needed to test this.”

Curiously, given the inclusion of the study in the 2025 Ig Nobels, the results were published in 2017 by the Journal of Psychopharmacology. So, it is possible that more academically- funded boozing has been taking place in the Netherlands over the intervening eight years. If so, we look forward to seing the results.

Thirsty chimps

In other more recent news, a report in Science Advances, of research in West and East Africa, suggests that chimpanzees may daily consume as much alcohol - in the form of ripe and over-ripe fruit - as a 70kg human consuming two and a half drinks.

“These findings” Aleksay Maro and his fellow researchers say “are consistent with the hypothesis that ethanol is widespread within tropical fruits and that modern predisposition to alcohol consumption derives from ancestral exposure to this psychoactive substance among frugivorous primates.”

(Please metaphorically raise your hand if ‘frugivorous’ was as unfamiliar to you as it was to me.)

And the dwarf hamsters

None of these three pieces of research have anything specific to say about wine, but they support the hypothesis that primates and humans have evolved to become hard-wired to enjoy and metabolise alcohol.

Finally, there’s other academic work that spreads its net rather wider. Earlier this year, Anna C Bowland of the University of Exeter and colleagues in the US published a paper snappily titled, the Evolutionary Ecology of Ethanol in which they sought to “challenge the current belief that modern humans are the only vertebrate that regularly and uniquely consumes ethanol and leads us to reconsider ethanol’s ecological role and evolutionary impact in nature.”

Listing a range of fauna including butterflies, bats and dwarf hamsters that seem to enjoy alcohol, the authors say evidence is growing that ethanol is naturally present in most sugary foods… a diverse coterie of animals demonstrate adaptation toward (rather than avoidance of) [it].” They continue that ethanol “can be toxic but also protective against ‘competing’ organisms, and metabolic adaptations to ethanol can expand the resources that provide calories to an animal.”

Counselling moderation

As with humans, alcohol can have a downside for our fellow creatures. “Flying accidents have” it seems “been reported for cedar waxwings who have ingested fermented berries” and “Ethanol intake is associated with increased arousal, relaxed inhibitory control, and impaired cognitive ability, all of which contribute to broader mate preferences” among fruit flies and “rodents within laboratory contexts.”

Female Drosophila simulans flies apparently “demonstrate reduced ‘choosiness’ and copulate with more males following ethanol exposure” while, even more strikingly, “male fruit flies consume alcohol when rejected as a mate”.

At a time when men and women in white coats are seeking to persuade us that even a drop of alcohol is potentially deadly, perhaps we should make more noise about the growing evidence that drinking and enjoying it, and occasionally suffering the consequences of doing so, is not just what makes us human - it’s what makes us part of the animal kingdom. And, as Patrick McGovern suggested, helps many of us to enjoy existing.