CHIMPS down alcohol equivalent to two glasses of wine a day, scientists have found.
The apes are known in the wild to get a buzz from fermented fruit such as mouldy figs and mangoes — but it was unclear how much they guzzled.
And experts now reckon humans may have inherited their taste for booze from our common ancestor.
A team from California University studied chimpanzees in Uganda and the Ivory Coast, and tested fallen fruits and urine samples for alcohol content.
They estimated chimps consume an average of 14mg of pure alcohol, known as ethanol, per day.
One unit in the UK is 8mg, so the chimps’ consumption is equal to just over 1.5 units — the same as a small 125ml glass of wine.
But as chimps weigh about half as much as humans, the effect would be more like us having two small glasses or two pints of beer.
Prof Robert Dudley said: “The chimps are eating five to ten per cent of their bodyweight a day in ripe fruit, so even low concentrations yield a substantial dosage of alcohol.
“That is with random sampling.
“If they prefer riper or more sugar-rich fruits, then this is a conservative lower limit for the likely rate of ethanol ingestion.”
Study co-author Aleksey Maro said the chimps did not act drunk and appeared able to handle the steady stream of alcohol.
He told journal Science Advances a big change between humans and our ape ancestors is that they would have had a “chronic low-level exposure” to booze all day every day.
He added: “Human attraction to alcohol probably arose from this.”
The study comes after researchers at Dartmouth College in July dubbed the apes’ habit “scrumping”.
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