It is very hard to tease genetic factors out from socio-economic ones, but IMHO it seems plausible that a population that has been exposed to alcohol for a long time (hundreds of generations) may have been better selected for higher tolerance than a population that has been exposed only recently (a few dozen generations, and with modern technology making selection pressure lower in general).
I think one thing to clarify here is that western Europeans have thousands of years of history brewing and drinking alcoholic beverages, but it was only in the past 250 years that heavily DISTILLED alcoholic beverages like whiskey at affordable prices became a thing. Have greater than 5 percent ABV in a beverage would've been a bit rarer preindustrial revolution I believe. Even heavily DISTILLED high proof colonial rum was quite expensive and typically mixed into punch water to bring down it's concentration. Mass production and lowering costs were what triggered the alcoholism epidemic and temperance movements of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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!
As a long-time tea drinker it was a shock to realize that while tea is pretty good for you, historically its biggest health contribution has been in drinking boiled (or almost boiled) water, not those catechins or l-theanine...
The evo-bio story of alcohol is confusing though, since fermentation has been present in East Asia as long as anywhere, and there's a large part of the population there that has the alcohol flush reaction.
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.
> 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.
The "alcohol flush" reaction seems to be genetically conserved in Asia because it gives resistance to rice pathogens not because it protects against "alcoholism".
Yeah, I'm not saying that this is actually true, only that it's not absurd on its face. As I understand it (and I am absolutely not an expert here) North American indigenous populations separated from Asians at the end of the ice age, i.e. ~10,000 years ago, and since then had no exposure to alcohol. That seems like plenty of time for genetic predisposition to alcohol tolerance to be reduced. So it's possible and worthy of serious consideration and investigation. Whether it's actually true is a completely different question, one where the jury is still pretty clearly out.
This is simply not true. Indigenous peoples of mesoamerica have drunk fermented maize beverages for as long as maize has been cultivated. Tejuino is still a quite popular drink in Mexico.
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.
My nan was born in the 1930s and I have kids. So we're already at 3 generations that have had a chance to breed. My great grandparents takes us not even back to the start of the 20th century.
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.
