Wild chimps indulge in booze-fuelled feasts, rare video shows

YOU don't have to venture far to observe humans in the wild sharing a few drinks at mealtimes.

- LEO SANDS

But we're not the only ones.

For the first time, wild chimps have been recorded indulging in alcohol together. (Just swap out the bottle of wine for a volleyball-size fermented breadfruit.)

According to the scientists who documented the scenes on video, the behaviour opens up the possibility that the primates - humans' closest relatives in the animal kingdom - could also use booze as a social bonding tool.

The ecologists at England's University of Exeter say they believe the sharing of boozy food is likely to be widespread among chimpanzees and has probably been observed previously without researchers realising what they were seeing.

The exact reason chimps share the alcohol-laced breadfruit for consumption is not yet known.

Still, the peer-reviewed findings, published in the journal Current Biology this week, offer a clue to another mystery: the origins of alcohol-fuelled feasting in humans, raising the idea that this trait is not a recent development but deeply rooted in our shared evolutionary history with other great apes.

Researchers have long suspected that humans' ability to metabolise alcohol could serve an evolutionary purpose a theory known as the "drunken monkey hypothesis".