A new research has revealed that the human ancestor may have been binging on the booze 10 million years ago, long before modern humans began brewing booze.
Lead author Matthew Carrigan said that a lot of aspects about the modern human condition everything from back pain to ingesting too much salt, sugar and fat goes back to our evolutionary history.
Carrigan added that they wanted to understand more about the modern human condition with regards to ethanol, referring to the kind of alcohol found in rotting fruit and that's also used in liquor and fuel.
Carrigan and his colleagues opted the method of using bacteria to read ancestral genes which is a new way to observe changes that happened a long time ago that didn't fossilize into bones.
The results suggested there was a single genetic mutation 10 million years ago that endowed human ancestors with an enhanced ability to break down ethanol.
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Carrigan added that he remembers seeing this huge difference in effects with this mutation and being really surprised.
The scientists noted that the timing of this mutation coincided with a shift to a terrestrial lifestyle and the ability to consume ethanol may have helped human ancestors dine on rotting, fermenting fruit that fell on the forest floor when other food was scarce.
The scientists detailed their findings online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
