Depending on who you ask, us humans were either created by an all-knowing, all-powerful omniscient being or we evolved from the simple ape. It’s too early on a Friday to get deep but, knowing what we do about the chimpanzees in Guinea and their love of the ale, the scales may have tipped.

Now they’re not like the beer drinkers around these here parts (bearded and slurping down microbrews) but chimps in Bossou in the Nzérékoré Region of southeast Guinea regularly tuck into alcohol they extract from the raffia palm. The plant’s sap is collected by local villagers in containers hung from the trees, leading the cheeky chimps to wait until it has fermented before popping by for a beer or three. Here’s the Daily Beast:

Over 17 years, the chimps have learned to drink the palm wine by dunking an absorbent leaf in the brew and then sucking the booze down.

And the palm hooch isn’t for lightweights. It’s between 3.1 percent and 6.9 percent ethanol by volume, about the same as your average pint of beer. Researchers estimated that some chimps ingested as much as 84.9 ml of ethanol in any given drinking event, which is about the same as three and a half Budweisers.

Please, give them a little more credit than accusing them of drinking Budweiser, otherwise known as alcoholic piss water. So how do they behave after imbibing the fermented sap? The study’s co-author below:

I have also seen an individual that was acting a bit more restless than the rest of the group” after ingesting a lot of palm wine. The sort of behavior (sic) that we see in humans seems to be close to what we observe [in the wild]. You drink too much and you want to sleep; or you drink too much and you get kind of restless.

Restless is, I assume, the PC word for those who drink too much and behave like primates by beating their chests and pursuing any female within crawling distance of the troop.

I wonder if they play ‘buffalo’?

[source:dailybeast]