Today's alcohol would knock our ancestors out cold

For most of our evolutionary history, alcohol looked nothing like today’s Bud Lights, Margaritas, or White Claws.

Picture this instead: overripe fruit on the forest floor or still on trees, gurgling and buzzing as wild fermentations do. Ten million years ago, early hominids grazed on this mush of fruit salad to score a dopamine hit, simultaneously consuming fiber, lactic acid bacteria, polyphenols, and other metabolites.

Our ancestors evolved specialized machinery for this tipsy tactic around 10 million years ago: a mutation in the ADH4 enzyme which made us roughly 40 times more efficient at metabolizing ethanol.