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Intriguing idea but not sure if it holds up upon further scrutiny. Alcoholic drinks have been around since at least as early as the Neolithic period (10,000BCE)

by lgvln 5y ago

Intriguing idea but not sure if it holds up upon further scrutiny. Alcoholic drinks have been around since at least as early as the Neolithic period (10,000BCE) and the earliest archaeological evidence shows that they have been around in China and Middle East/Mesopotamia around the same time (~7000BCE). So why did the East Asians evolved to have the "Asian flush" while the rest of the world didn't? Someone mentioned that alcoholic drinks were safer to drink than water so people were drinking alcoholic drinks as a safer alternative. But we have to remember the various "cradles of civilizations"(Mesopotamia, Yellow river, Indus Valley etc) all evolved around rivers so access to clean water probably wasn't a major issue. What's more likely is the effect is an unintended consequence. Other qualities "unique" to Asians or East Asians are a general lack of body hair and (more pronounced) neoteny. I don't think there are adequate theories for those quality either. There's still a long way to go to fully understand evolution and genetics.

BurningFrog 5y ago
China has had continuous organized civilization, and the alcohol it produces, at least as long as anywhere. That makes a good environment for mutations that protect people from alcohol consumption, but such mutations still has to randomly appear, and that it happened to appear in East Asia is probably just random. The fact that populations who have never had alcohol succumb to rampant alcoholism when first getting access implies that even the eurasian populations without the Asian Flush genes probably has some less obvious genetic protection. You can also think of it as the most alcoholic prone genes have been weeded out over the centuries.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
It's tea. Early European civilisations kept their water safe by making it lightly alcoholic - Early Asian civilizations just boiled their water to make tea.

by lgvln 5y ago

BurningFrog 5y ago

China has had continuous organized civilization, and the alcohol it produces, at least as long as anywhere. That makes a good environment for mutations that protect people from alcohol consumption, but such mutations still has to randomly appear, and that it happened to appear in East Asia is probably just random. The fact that populations who have never had alcohol succumb to rampant alcoholism when first getting access implies that even the eurasian populations without the Asian Flush genes probably has some less obvious genetic protection. You can also think of it as the most alcoholic prone genes have been weeded out over the centuries.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

It's tea. Early European civilisations kept their water safe by making it lightly alcoholic - Early Asian civilizations just boiled their water to make tea.