Humans started brewing alcohol 9,000 years ago, but nature has been doing it much longer, via yeast fermentation in rotting fruits and other sugary substances.
The (aptly named) bohemian waxwing may gorge on so many fermented rowan berries in winter that it’s unable to fly or even walk in a straight line. But one of the keenest mammalian boozers is a tiny Malaysian tree shrew, whose nectar diet is 3.8 per cent alcohol by volume, akin to drinking beer all day.
And they're not the only ones. It’s well known that certain non-human primates enjoy a drop of the hard stuff. Chimpanzees are known to raid stocks of palm wine brewed by villagers and feral vervet monkeys in the Caribbean are famous for stealing alcoholic drinks from bars.
Research shows that spider monkeys routinely consume fermenting fruit, backing up the notion that humans inherited their proclivity for alcohol from our primate ancestors – the so-called “drunken monkey hypothesis.”