https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans#G...
Alcoholism rates among Native Americans is higher than most groups, which leads some to suspect a genetic reason. Currently, there isn't a ton of evidence supporting that idea.
Alcoholism rates among Native Americans is higher than most groups, which leads some to suspect a genetic reason. Currently, there isn't a ton of evidence supporting that idea.
I understand that historically it was used in some sense to control and indeed damage the Native Americans by the colonists? To what extent alcohol was completely new etc I do not know
You could tell the story as like, alcohol puts pressure on a population to evolve better responses, and with enough time the flush evolves and that helps limit drinking. But that's pretty just-so.
Arguably what has changed is the ABV of such beverages. Post-industrial alcohol percentages are way higher than what precolonial mesoamericans, ancient Greeks, and vikings we're drinking
OK, but Pine Ridge is in North America. There could have been enough isolation in pre-Columbian times for north American indigenous to evolve a different alcohol response from mesoamericans.
Like I said: I am not an expert, and I have no idea whether this hypothesis is true or not. I'm just not aware of any facts that would rule it out.
The "alcohol flush" reaction seems to be genetically conserved in Asia because it gives resistance to rice pathogens not because it protects against "alcoholism".
Drinking in northern Europe does have a way longer and more entrenched history than elsewhere though. Colonial men women and children all drank watered down rum and beer which were more hygienic than water. In China, by contrast, half of the population gets Asian flush and cannot tolerate alcohol, and there is a strong traditional culture of boiling water and drinking tea!
Having kids at 30 is historically very late. Late teens and early 20s was much more common. So perhaps not a few dozen, but certainly over a dozen.
Kind of a tricky question that is somewhat covered in my link. Alcohol was definitely brewed in the Americas pre-Columbus, but by the seventeenth century alcohol was largely unknown to the Natives interacting with the colonists.
The tarahumara people's have more alcoholic version called tesguino that is only drunk once per year as the preparation process is labor intensive, and the drink goes bad rather quickly
Background: Humans are highly unusual amongst mammals; our livers are more than ten thousand times IIRC better at burning off alcohol than any other known mammal, and this is a rather recent change evolutionarily. This may have been necessary to survive off old winter fruit during the ice age that just about took us out (reduced our population down to low genetic variation.)
Alcohol, in common with all other organic solvents save water, changes every single chemical reaction within our cells at least a little bit - esp the speed and frequency of given reactions. (Hence the cancer risk, etc, etc.) The change to neurotransitter reactions is just one of those changes, but one we find pleasing and distracting. Some genes protective re alcohol consumption reduce the effects/pleasure alcohol brings. Others may reduce habituation (so dose doesn't tend to increase.) Etc. My genes adapt me so quickly to alcohol that habituation/dosage escalates FAST. I and my relatives famously just shouldn't start since alcoholism is a quick result if we keep drinking.
Cultures which have cultivated alcohol for thousands of years (Asia) are less vulnerable to alcoholism; no doubt those kinda genes were culled sometime back. Europeans less so, less protected. Central American native populations cultivated alcohol but (at least in some cultures) restricted its use to the elderly. North American natives, not to my knowlege.
Selecting strongly for alcohol resistance has costs, off course, there are always tradeoffs. And where evolutionary selection has acted very strongly over a short period of time, the tradeoffs (downsides) can be extreme (particularly from copy-number variations, which are common under heavy/fast selection.)
If you're going to be a teetotaller anyway, you'd prefer to have Native genes on average (other confounding variables aside.) But if you're going to drink - and alcohol is obviously dangerous - well, maybe you don't want the otherwise more ideal Native/original genetics; maybe some alcohol-protective genes (with other downsides) would predict a longer and better life for you, on average.
However, there’s a lot of propaganda that will pretend otherwise.