Researchers from Santa Fe College (Fla.) discovered that the human digestive tract has for 10 million years been equipped with an enzyme which breaks down ethanol. The results were published online this past Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The article, titled “Hominids adapted to metabolize ethanol long before human-directed fermentation” negates previous ideas that humans began consuming alcohol less than 10,000 years ago.

“The previous estimates that stated human ancestors began consuming alcohol 9,000 years ago is a few orders of magnitude off,” reported Medical Daily this week. “The real timeline, researchers claim, traces back as far as 10 million years.”

According to the study's abstract, the presence indicates that, about 10 million years ago, our ancestors encountered fermented fruit in the wild and were able to ingest the food because of the presence of an enzyme known as alcohol dehydrogenase class IV., more commonly known as ADH4.

The key event for this discovery, researcher Matthew Carrigan said, was the point at which our ancestors shifted their life from trees to the forest floor.

Part of the motivation for the study, according to Carrigan's report, was to discover whether alcoholism is a matter of late-blooming humans or of a recent gene mutation.

The idea behind this distinction is the timeline which, until Carrigan's study, had been assumed to be a timeline which started nine millenia ago.

Los Angeles Times reporter Melissa Healy gave a succinct description this past Monday of the relationship between alcoholism and the timeline.

“If humankind's relationship with drink were truly (only 9,000 years old), it would stand to reason that many among us might not yet have acquired the evolutionary means to tolerate alcohol,” Healy wrote. “If primates have been enjoying the effects of fermentation for 10 million years...that would suggest that humans...have by now pretty fully evolved to consume alcohol (and) any genetic predisposition to alcoholism might be viewed as the result of a more recent, or more random, genetic mutation.”

Your ancestors knew how great wine was long before you did.“Because fruit collected from the forest floor is expected to contain higher concentrations of fermenting yeast and ethanol than similar fruits hanging on trees, this transition may also be the first time our ancestors were exposed to (and adapted to) substantial amounts of dietary ethanol.”