New research from the University of St Andrews and Dartmouth College examines the crucial, but until now, overlooked, role of 'scrumped' fruit in the lives of great apes and the origins of human feasting.
Published today (Thursday 31 July) in BioScience , this pioneering study is the first to tackle the mystery of why humans are so astoundingly good at metabolising alcohol.
The findings show that feeding on fermented fruits gathered from the forest floor is an important behaviour in the lives of African apes, and one that explains why they, and we, evolved the ability to digest alcohol efficiently.
Researchers from the University of St Andrews and four other international institutions worked with a large observational data set to quantify, for the first time, how regularly this behaviour happens across great apes.
Co-author Nathaniel Dominy, the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, said: "One problem for the researchers was that there was no word to describe 'feeding on fruits gathered from the forest floor.' Nobody wants more jargon, but without a word to talk about something, a behaviour is easily overlooked"
They repurposed the word 'scrumping', the act of gathering, or sometimes stealing, windfallen apples and other fruit. It is an English derivation of the middle low German word schrimpen, a mediaeval noun for describing overripe or fermented fruit.
Whilst searching for the right term they discovered that there is a long-standing representation in gothic art of primates picking fruit from the ground. By repurposing the term scrumping, they suggest their work is a case of "life imitating art imitating life."
A range of work points towards the fact that ripe fruit contain small-but scrumptious-levels of ethanol, there have been recent findings hinting at the importance of chimpanzees' feeding socially on fruits.
Building on those findings, this paper has revealed that, counter to widespread beliefs that primates do not 'scrump,' African apes, but not orangutans, 'scrump' on a regular basis. This behavioural difference is crucial, as the same pattern is reflected in an important genetic mutation that allows African apes to metabolise alcohol 40x more efficiently than orangutans and other primates, and could be an important link to the evolution of humans' long-standing affair with alcohol.
Co-lead author Professor Catherine Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience, said: "A fundamental feature of our relationship with alcohol, is our tendency to drink together, whether a pint with friends or a large social feast. The next step is to investigate how shared feeding on fermented fruits might also influence social relationships in other apes."
Professor Hobaiter added, "One upshot is that sharing a cold pint of scrumpy this summer echoes a behaviour our ape ancestors might have already been partaking in 10 million years ago."
