Drinking isn’t for everyone. But it’s possible that without alcohol, there wouldn’t be anyone. That is, a taste for and tolerance of fermented fruits and roots may be the evolutionary advantage that helped Homo erectus climb down for cocktail hour, leaving the other simians stuck up a tree.
This is one of the theories entertained in an amusing — well, amusing for an academic work — text just out from Princeton University Press: Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human. The authors are Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist, and Rob Dunn, who teaches at the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. What? Never heard of evolutionary hologenomics? I thought by now every scientifically literate high school sophomore knew that evolutionary hologenomics is the study of how organisms symbiotically evolve with microbes, viruses, and some other stuff not mentioned on Google, where I went to look up what the heck hologenomics is.
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