A tiny tree-shrew that lives on alcoholic nectar could - pound for pound - drink the average human under the table, scientists have discovered.

(...)

Chemicals in the hair samples showed that on any given night, a tree-shrew had a 36% chance of being drunk by human standards.
The shrew's resistance to intoxication suggests its body must have an effective mechanism for breaking down alcohol.

This should not come as too much of a surprise: scientists believe the animals - which are distant relatives of humans - have had 55 million years of evolution to adapt to their boozy lifestyle.

The researchers used radio tags to track the creatures on their crawls and recorded video of their feeding sessions.

Humans may even preserve a relic of the shrews' love of alcohol that has lasted through millions of years of evolution.

In their PNAS paper, the scientists wrote that the pen-tailed tree-shrew is "a living model for extinct mammals, representing the stock from all extinct and living tree-shrews and primates radiated".

They added: "Therefore, we hypothesise that moderate to high alcohol intake was present early on in the evolution of these closely related lineages."