Where would we be without honey, sugar cane, molasses, maple syrup and corn syrup? Down in the dumps, for sure.
The human tongue can detect four basic flavors — salt, sour, bitter and sweet, but humans are naturally drawn to sweet because we are primates, animals that evolved eating fruit in the trees.
Monkeys and ape spend their days in the forest searching for ripe fruit. They have been selected to prefer sweet, ripe fruit over unripe, bitter fruit because it has higher sugar content and supplies more ready energy. Ripe fruit also has more water, which can be hard to find high in the canopy.
So it makes sense for primates, including us, to have a highly developed palate for sweet things.
We domesticated sugar cane, a tropical grass, and carried it across the world; Arabs spread sugar cane as their empire grew, Crusaders brought cane back to Northern Europe and
Columbus introduced sugar cane plants into the Caribbean
clipped from: www.livescience.com