Monkeys often eat fruit containing alcohol, shedding light on our taste for booze

For 25 years, UC Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley has been intrigued by humans’ love of alcohol. In 2014, he wrote a book proposing that our attraction to booze arose millions of years ago, when our ape and monkey ancestors discovered that the scent of alcohol led them to ripe, fermenting and nutritious fruit.

A new study now supports this idea, which Dudley calls the “drunken monkey” hypothesis.