Are chimpanzees catching a buzz? Scientists reveal their taste for fermented fruit
Chimps regularly enjoy the equivalent of two human-standard drinks per day.
It appears the evolutionary line didn’t split out from our common ancestor with chimpanzees before the instinct to have a drink was instilled into our genome.
A new study published in Science Advances suggests that wild chimpanzees regularly consume alcohol by eating naturally fermenting fruit in their forest homes. The research, carried out in Kibale National Park (Uganda) and Taï National Park (Ivory Coast), shows that chimps are exposed to measurable ethanol in their diet just by foraging.
Biologists analysed more than twenty species of ripe fruit frequently eaten by chimpanzees at both sites. They found the average alcohol content (by weight) in these fruits to be around 0.30-0.32%, a level generated by natural fermentation caused by yeast and other microbes consuming sugars in the fruit pulp.
In 1966, human behaviourists raised a chimpanzee as their own and taught her rudimentary sign language. She started swearing almost immediately.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) September 20, 2025
Chimps consuming “a substantial dosage of alcohol”
Senior study author Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a news release that the chimps “are eating 5 to 10% of their body weight a day in ripe fruit, so even low concentrations yield … a substantial dosage of alcohol.”
Based on the alcohol concentrations measured, this amounts to roughly 14 grams of ethanol daily, or about one standard U.S. drink. When you adjust for body size (chimps being smaller than most humans), this intake becomes equivalent to approximately two human-standard drinks per day.
“If the chimps are randomly sampling ripe fruit as did Aleksey (Maro, lead study author), then that’s going to be their average consumption rate, independent of any preference for ethanol. But if they are preferring riper and/or more sugar-rich fruits, then this is a conservative lower limit for the likely rate of ethanol ingestion.”
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“It just points to the need for additional federal funding for research into alcohol attraction and abuse by modern humans. It likely has a deep evolutionary background,” Dudley concluded.
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