[muawiyah]

Just thinking of the Silk Road circa 1500 BC ~ up to 250 AD and what hepatitis would have done to the folks who worked that route ~ sure, kill off everyone, or nearly everyone, who didn't have a gene that made them very sick when they drank alcohol from the community beer or wine pot.

Raises a question ~ do Jews abstain culturally, or do they get nauseus?

I know folks with the gene and sometimes they find themselves in the middle of projectile vomiting without warning.

This is similar to the genes that control celiac disease. Eat the wrong stuff (wheat gluten) and within half an hour your system is expelling the clymatis containing grain product (if you're an early agricultural revolution type). Cherry/apple/peach allergy genes would protect against eating baby birch trees which have enough cyanide to kill humans. Lots of these genes around.

[blam]

I knew you'd add something interesting. Thanks.

[BIV]

I don’t know much about Jewish culture, but I think their springtime holiday called Purim puts to rest any notion that Jews, collectively, have an alcoholic or alcohol-averse gene.

[John Locke]

Fascinating study.

The principle advantage of being able to drink alcoholic beverages is that you don't have to drink water - a substance that for most of human history has varied from nasty to lethal. So perhaps these Altaic people had access to uncontaminated water, and so never evolved the ability to tolerate booze.

And, as I see it, that's probably the order of events: humans were initially alcohol intolerant (also lactose intolerant, but that's another long story); alcohol tolerance is a mutation that caught on in regions where the water supply was problematic.

(And I'll drink to that!)