Tipsy talk

Scientists are linking man’s penchant for drinking alcohol to their ancestor chimpanzees’ habit of eating fallen fruits on the forest floor.

In research led by Aleksey Maro of the University of California, Berkeley, and published in the journal Science Advances, it was found that wild chimps in Côte d’Ivoire and Uganda ingest daily around 14 grams of ethanol — equivalent to 330 milliliters of beer, BBC reported.

Dr. Kimberley Hockings, who studies primates at the University of Exeter and was not involved in the research, noted that the chimpanzees in the study were not consuming enough alcohol to become drunk, according to BBC.

Fruit bats, however, actually get drunk by eating overripe fermenting fruits, based on a 2002 study by Yossi Razin and Binyamin Pinshow, biologists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Upon measuring the bats’ blood alcohol levels and testing their flight performance, the scientists found that their coordination and ability to fly were impaired, similar to tipsy humans.

The discovery of the alcoholic Egyptian fruit bats, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in 2002, recently won the aviation prize in the 35th edition of the annual Ig Nobel Awards (INA), an event organized by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to celebrate the sillier side of science, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Meanwhile, the 2025 INA peace prize went to another group of alcohol researchers who discovered the effect of drunkenness on pronouncing foreign words.

The winning Dutch-German-UK team were drinking at a bar during an international conference when they noticed that “drunken Germans usually pronounce Dutch better than sober Germans,” they said in a statement read at the INA awarding ceremony at Boston University on 18 September.

The researchers attributed the correct pronunciation to the confidence of the Germans boosted by a small dose of alcohol, though they did not recommend using booze as a language-learning tool, according to AFP.