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Ancient Nubians Drank Antibiotic-Laced Beer
eldavojohn writes "A new analysis of millennia old mummy bones (abstract; full article is paywalled) shows high concentrations of tetracycline, which indicates empirical knowledge and use of antibiotics — most likely consumed in beer. The researchers traced the source of the antibiotics to the soil bacteria streptomyces present in the grain used to ferment the beer. Astonishingly enough, 'Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline, suggesting that they were giving high doses to the child to try and cure him of illness.' The extent of saturation in the bones leads the scientists to assert that the population regularly consumed tetracycline antibiotics knowing that it would cure certain sicknesses."
the population regularly consumed tetracycline antibiotics ... leading to the whole population being suddenly wiped out by the TRSA superbug !
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
"What's a Nubian?"
Smile, don't click...
The sickness, the tetracycline, or simply the high dose of beer?
giving a child drug-laced beer. Next they'll discover they also used medical marijuana, which would be an even greater sin.
Sometimes sick people got better after drinking beer.
How is this any different than any historical herbal remedy? They didn't need to have any more knowledge of anti-biotics than natives eating mushrooms need know the shrooms contain psilocybin.
Bacteria infected their grain, this resulted in anti-biotic beer which became a local herbal remedy or healing potion. No actual discovery of bacteria or idea WHY the remedy heals. Interesting but hardly 'astonishing'.
Still gonna talk about it.
1: If the substance was found in the soil, and the body was buried, doesn't that mean it might just have absorbed it from the soil it was buried in?
2: Since the reason their beer had antibiotics was due to a lucky coincidence of having soil laced with the antibiotic, did they really know about antibiotics or did they just think they had "magic beer" that cured illnesses.
3: Maybe they just really liked their beer which is why so many of them drank it.
... beer!
Check out my novel.
1. A new analysis of millennia old mummy bones shows high concentrations of tetracycline.
2. The researchers traced the source of the antibiotics to the soil bacteria streptomyces present in the grain used to ferment the beer.
3. Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline.
Why my conclusion isn't "the population regularly consumed tetracycline antibiotics knowing that it would cure certain sicknesses." but "the Nubian were a bunch of alcoholics, including the children"?
It's because of the irresponsible waste of antibiotics by Adama and Roslin that humans had to learn it all over again :-)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Ancient nubians used moldy grain when making beer.
(Yes, streptomyces is a bacteria, but colonies look like and are often confused with mold.)
Sometimes a duck is just a duck. Sometimes, a duck is a cornish game hen in an inflatable suit.
-- $G
to try and cure him... to try to cure him.... which sounds better to you?
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline, suggesting that they were giving high doses to the child to try and cure him of illness.
And why wouldn't they give this "cure" to a child? Did they have clinical trials that showed liver damage with extensive use of alcohol? And it's not like their younger population got drunk and got into bar fights.
That's like finding out ancient tribes used to smoke marihuana or consume magic mushrooms and saying "Oh gosh! How could they do this, didn't they know Liberals in the future will outlaw fun and make it it illegal?!"
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I think it's more likely that these people just ate a lot of dirt with the stuff in it.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
There are a lot of ancient evidence of indirect antibiotic use, usually through moulds grown on specific substrates (e.g. specific type of bread). The ancient use of penicillin is another good example of this. Of course, they didn't known what compound was responsible for this, but they nevertheless found efficient way to produce it and found out when it was good to used it to cure specific illnesses.
What's particularly interesting about TFA, is that this research seems to suggest that the use of antibiotics was very common and systematic.
I don't see any around. Did it kill them off?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why do modern people think everyone in the past was stupid? Is it really so much of a stretch to believe that ancient people were capable of figuring out that consuming certain substances helped cure certain ailments? They managed to figure out monumental architecture - is it so hard to believe that they could do the math and realize that drinking beer helped them feel better under certain circumstances? The fact that ancient people didn't have access to the internet doesn't mean they were idiots.
Question: Is resistance to antibiotics energy-unfavourable for bacteria? Meaning, if antibiotics are not abundantly present to guide bacterial evolution, will bacterial strains revert to a 'simpler structure' and become susceptible to antibiotics again?
Nubian please!
Wounded animals lay down on moss to heal these wounds. So why should this animal, which calls himself distinct from all the others, not be able to use natural ressources? Even Fleming didn't do anything else, his achievement is the utilisation of modern science (getting good results from not knowing what they are doing).
cb
Was this just an unintended side-effect of making their water fit to drink, or did they recognize the benefit of antibiotics and intentionally grow bacteria? If the latter, did they perform double-blind tests to confirm medicinal effect or did beer drinkers simply live longer and therefore had more opportunity to procreate? Without clear documentation, we can only make semi-educated guesses about what they accomplished. There's a lesson here. Some day, after a stray meteor takes out humanity on earth, a curious alien race drawn by our projected radio signals is going to visit to assess our accomplishments. The stuff that is documented and committed to media that can withstand heavy impact and vibration and doesn't need electricity, that will go down in their History of Earthlings. But all the online content, the Internet-based research and collaboration? That'll just be material for aliens to argue about on their version of /.
They did not consume high concentrations of tetracycline.
They knew beer was good and healthy for people, and consumed very high concentrations of beer!
Bless the Gods Byggver and Silenus for BEER!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
If the article is paywalled, why give it free advertising and free traffic.
If it is paywalled, it should get no traffic.
Yes, I went there.
The presence of Carbon 14 in their bones is PROOF! PerOOF I tell you! that they had empirical knowledge of radionuclide dating techniques, and consumed precisely enough of the stuff to tell us just exactly how long ago they lived. But how did they know how far in the future it would be when we got their bones and dated them? Because they had the same empirical knowledge of the same psychic pills being taken by the researchers who could read their dead minds to learn that they had empirical knowledge of antibiotics when the evidence only indicates they absorbed endemic soil bacteria whether or not it might have come along with something that they ate which grew in the soil.
1. Dirt (dirty dirt!) ...
2. Beer (dirty beer!)
3.
4. SCIENCE!
I say they got it mixed up. The bones were buried in the soil with the bugs in it. The researchers were the ones with the beer. I have empirical proof: This is my empire and I say that it's so.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
than the current stable of American light beers! It gives you a buzz and you will only get sick if you drink too much!
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
No joke. If the yeast didn't have the ability to kill bacteria (just as other fungi like Penicillium do), it would lose out to the bacteria and fermentation would end with malt vinegar instead. Once people in central Europe got into brewing, they demonstrated empirical knowledge and use of of preservatives: The hops!
Probably not...and here's why.
It's not that they didn't have "modern science" - whatever that means. It's that there is no evidence of well controlled experimentation and statistical methods. Without those much of western medicine would be stuck in the stone age too. The only two compounds that I know of that showed empirical use in the history of Western medicine are Quinona bark as an anti-malarial and Salix for pain releif. However if you look at even the early accounts of Salix use you'll see that people like Rev. Stone who kept careful (but methodological retarded) records came to the conclusion that Salix could be used for Ague (fever) but if you do the math it's reasonable to believe that he never gave them a therapeutic dose for fever and his records don't really record much about pain (which is often tricky to measure anyway). That leaves us with Quinona which was fatal in about 20% of serious cases. That is - IMHO pretty close to the threshold that humans can detect without actually doing math.
Take a look at using ASA as intervention for preventing cardiac events - that had three or four small studies which all came up pretty inconclusive IIRC. It was only when *combining* the studies did we get a result that showed some effect.
This isn't cultural elitism just the acknowledgment that in order to use something intentionally you need large samples, good record keeping and at least some knowledge of probability.
What's a Nubian?
Bow-ties are cool.
Nubians are like giant smurfs. Could the bones have gotten the tetracycline some other way? Maybe from the local soil, or teeth of azreal.
Hello Cruel World
Maybe the ancient Nubians just knew how to party.
is it keeping the bears away?
So much for all that "reduce, reuse, recycle" business -- every time I've tried to make multiple omelets, reusing the same eggs, it never quite comes out right.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Did you notice the summary was very specific in describing it as empirical knowledge? Have you considered the difference in meaning between theoretical knowledge and empirical knowledge? The concepts are related, and depending on the strictness of interpretation; they can overlap. I don't think you can fairly lay down a "not really, no" on this one if you take the time to understand the language being used in the summary.
To be fair, I did not RTFA. If you're addressing specific claims mentioned there-in, I might have missed them.
'Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline, suggesting that they were giving high doses to the child to try and cure him of illness.'
In colonial America and up through the 1800's water in America was not sanitary enough to drink in most places. Nearly every man woman and child consumed beer as their primary fluid. I can assume hypothesize that the Nubians learned quickly that their water was disease ridden and unsafe as it remains today. I would expect them to consume beverages that had to be heated. These days we know that this kills the disease causing microbes, but it seems likely this would have been a case of serendipity for them to have discovered this.
It seems interesting to draw a conclusion that because tetracyclin was in kids bones, the nubians also understood in some way germ theory. Perhaps they did, but it seems less likely especially since the tetracyclin was in beer because of the process of brewing process most likely.
The British colonists in India used to drink IPA for the same reasons.
I Shatner you not.
Black Israel is that group of retards on the streets that behave worse than the pleasant bell-ringing of Santa, the pious donation attendants, or a captivating street preacher giving lessons to anyone that asked: Black Israel are the CREATURES that yell at people saying that there is no white race because they are whitened Africans.
What chuckles me (and *ahhem* some white-robed cavaliers) the most is when one of them says that we have an African father somewhere in our family tree.
Solution : get the 4-year old kid pissed into unconsciousness. No problem.
Yes - this is a joke, but not that far-fetched. Certainly, getting the complaining children pissed and/ or stoned is a tactic with a long history. Look at the ingredient list of things like "gripe water" : you'd have the same effect and a bigger bill from drinking raw gin. And no shortage of other past "soothing treatments" were laced with opioids, heroin, hypnotics and or hallucinogens.
But manufacturing beer is relatively expensive - in raw materials, in storage vessels, in time and effort. Getting wailing kids pissed isn't going to be an efficient use of these resources. Though getting an injured wailing kid pissed enough to splint a limb, or reduce a dislocation is more credible.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
From the sarcastic comments here, it is a wonder any technology was developed by the human race! I think you guys are missing the point here. A good example of how this type a "herbal remedy" can develop into "real science" is demonstrated in James Burke's "Connections" series. In that program, he takes a modern invention (revealed in the final scene of the program) and traces "one" of the routes through history as discoveries of "tribal" and scientific lead the viewer through the series of seemingly unconnected discoveries that result in the final modern invention. The fact that that somebody did correlate the medicinal effects of the beer on curing illness, likely resulted form a shamanistic approach to healing the sick. It was through this type of cause and effect or deductive reasoning that most "pre scientific theory" discoveries were made. It doesn't matter if the practitioner understood "WHY" something worked in so much that they recognized that it "DID WORK". Do we REALLY understand DNA (or are we just using information gleaned from experiements to "poke around"? Science is a search for knowledge, so take this article as it was intended, an example of early cause and effect relationships between scientific discovery and common sense.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke