People go to pubs for a variety of reasons: social, recreational, and communal; including socialising with friends, relaxing after work, enjoying food and drinks, and experiencing the local community atmosphere.
But there may also be a (deeper) evolutionary reason – the ‘drunken monkey’ hypothesis. This also explains the broader human taste for alcohol, which extends across all human cultures, past and present.
The hypothesis suggests that human attraction to alcohol stems from our evolutionary history as fruit-eating primates, where alcohol, naturally present in fermenting fruit, provided an advantage in locating ripe and nutritious food. Here’s a more detailed explanation:
The hypothesis posits that early primate ancestors, including our own, relied on ripe and fermenting fruit as a key food source.
When yeast ferments sugars in fruit, it produces ethanol (alcohol).
It is not just current homo sapiens that go on pub crawls. Modern primates (as well as our prehuman ancestors) evolved a genetic predisposition to be attracted to the smell and taste of alcohol, as it signalled the presence of nutritious, ripe fruit.
The ability to locate and consume fermenting fruit, even in small quantities, could have provided a survival advantage in the wild.
How? The odours of ripening fruit would help primates find scarce calories in tropical rain forests, given that ethanol is a relatively light molecule and is moved rapidly by winds through vegetation.
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