Drunk Chimps

Drunk Chimpanzees

Fermented fruit in nature has higher alcohol content than you might think at first.

The frequency of episodes involving drunk chimps happen somewhat rarely, but when they do drink, they do it for a span of time ranging from a few minutes to over an hour.

There are also cases in Africa, researched by scientists including Dr. Tatyana Hummel and Prof. Katherine Hill of the Royal Society Open Science, where chimps will avail themselves to drinking when given the chance, while others will get to the fruits used for making the alcohol. When they do, they make themselves unpopular with the local villagers who use fruit to make things like banana beer and other alcoholic elixirs.

They are not seeking out the fruit for alcoholic effect. It seems to be more opportunistic.

This is different, of course, from recent studies that showed chimpanzees prefer cooked food to the raw variety, and that they would actually wait for food to be cooked, even bringing raw food to cooking devices, knowing that the output of their effort would result in cooked food.

Chimps also smile, just like we do. It's been known that they grin, though we did not know why.  Although scientists have noted the behavior of humans found that making faces was a very human response to things like fear, it is evident now that chimps smile in much the same biomechanical way, and that you can trace this behavior of smiling back probably around 5 million years. The research found that our evolutionary ancestors smiled when they played.