The only thing I learned from this study is that the 20% of the Chinese can't drink.
good strategy -- there are time when every calorie you can get counts.
bad strategy -- its addictive and toxic.
solution? favor those who could consume it to avoid starvation, but would not touch it otherwise because it is so unpleasant (instant hangover).
Meanwhile brewing alcohol only started maybe 3k years ago in north western Europe so they are still figuring it out.
And poor north America did not stand a chance, bulk fruit/grain preservation via fermentation had never became widespread then it showed up fully refined.
Metabolizing alcohol yields aldehydes, which can and do cause double strand breaks in DNA. We normally have processes to repair the damage but mistakes will be made and build up over time.
There is no minimum safe healthy amount to consume.
Drinking alcohol just beats starving, nothing more.
I am not advocating this in any way of course, just pointing out why getting drunk might have evolutionary benefits besides not starving to death.
> Chinese were first to rely on fermented grains to be food at least 6k years ago.
Not really. We found vessels that are that old, and that contained fermented grain, the rest is extrapolation. There is also evidence of some kind of beer making in Egypt not that long afterwards. Fermented things are present in almost any culture you could care to have a look at, even the remotest Amazonian tribes.
> solution? favor those who could consume it to avoid starvation, but would not touch it otherwise because it is so unpleasant (instant hangover).
6k years is awfully short for evolution to drive out a bit of genotype in a whole population. Also, again the same thing was happening in Egypt at around the same time, and we don’t have any proof that it did not happen elsewhere as well.
Also, a pet peeve of mine: evolution is not sentient. There is no being that “favor” or drive to extinction according to a pre-existing plan.
> Meanwhile brewing alcohol only started maybe 3k years ago in north western Europe so they are still figuring it out.
It does not work like that, there is no line in the sand for evolution to have worked instead of being “figuring it out”.
For some versions of a gene to be selected, you also need a driving force, in the form of either improved fitness in some environments, or the number of children. Alcohol causing a tiny increase in absolute terms of some specific types of cancers, that are not all that likely to kill someone before they reproduce, seems quite unlikely to be that driving force.
OTOH, alcohol is well known to increase social contacts, which is likely to result in more offsprings (see e.g. studies on alcohol consumption and teenage pregnancy rates).
Overall, this theory sounds truthy and consistent with a pop-culture understanding of evolution, but is not quite consistent with our understanding of history or biology.