Are these chimps having a fruity booze-up in the wild?

Is there anything more human than gathering in groups to share food and partake in a fermented beverage or two (or three, or....)? Researchers have caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be similar activity: sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, the observational data is the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild.

The fruit in question is seasonal and comes from Treculia africana trees common across the home environment of the wild chimps in Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau. Once mature, the fruits drop from the tree to the ground and slowly ripen from a hard, deep green exterior to a yellow, spongier texture. Because the chimps are unhabituated, the authors deployed camera traps at three separate locations to record their feeding and sharing behavior.

They recorded ten instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. The authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer between April and July, 2022, and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

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