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."

Comments

Where are they now?

[clickety6]

the population regularly consumed tetracycline antibiotics ... leading to the whole population being suddenly wiped out by the TRSA superbug !

So what killed the kid?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sickness, the tetracycline, or simply the high dose of beer?

Re:So what killed the kid?

[Narcocide]

Drunk driving.

Re:So what killed the kid?

[qwijibo]

The scientist. It would be inhumane to run these tests on a live child.

That's just wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

giving a child drug-laced beer. Next they'll discover they also used medical marijuana, which would be an even greater sin.

Not really, no

[shaitand]

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'.

Re:Not really, no

[somersault]

Or maybe they just liked beer.. I'm pretty sure most people consuming large doses of beer these days aren't doing it for the health benefits.

Re:Not really, no

[Sycraft-fu]

Ya this kinda sounds like herbal medicine BS in reverse. Rather than saying "People used herbs to cure illness so these herbs will cure you!" form of modern luddism this is kind of a reverse claim of forced sophistication "These people's remedy had anti-biotics so clearly they know about anti-biotics and did it on purpose!"

I doubt there was empirical testing going on here. As the parent said, the beer sometimes helped people get better so they used it. This is like any other herbal remedy. Once we got better at all this and started testing, we found that sometimes herbal remedies were on the money. People used willow bark as an analgesic and fever reducer and sure as shit, one of the ingredients works great and lead to aspirin. Others have some minor benefits, sometimes it is questionable if it is statistically significant but the seem to help in some things. Others were just placebo, they don't do shit.

None of this was know, hence why there's a great mixture.

I like what Dara O' Briain has to say about it: "Oh herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years. Indeed it has, and then we tested it all and the stuff that worked became -medicine-. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri. So knock yourselves out."

Re:Not really, no

[shaitand]

quite possible, they could have been drowning their sick children in massive doses of beer to ease their suffering.

In the Nubians defense, 'most people consuming large doses of beer these days' aren't consuming anti-biotic beer so they don't have the opportunity to drink it for the same health benefits. Besides that, anti-biotics can be ordered in pure forms now.

Re:Not really, no

[shaitand]

I wouldn't go as far with herb bashing as you (you seem to be implying willow bark is the only herb with a better than minor effect). Half the herbs on the shelf in GNC have peer reviewed double blind studies backing them which is really all the prescription drugs show. The effects or many are significant enough they need to be considered right alongside prescription meds for contraindications.

None of that is to say that there is any sort of manufacturing oversight, claims testing (particularly in the diet and erectile dysfunction areas) or that a natural random soup of chemicals is somehow automatically safer than an intelligently purpose crafted solution. But there ARE many effective herbal remedies and some that seem to be more effective than prescription solutions (marijuana is far more effective than comparable prescription medications in not one but numerous areas). Another example is fish oil, like marijuana there are many physicians recommending fish oil over FDA approved supplements.

A lot of people have a bogus idea about herbal testing. They think because no testing is required that none is performed. Or they believe some odd myth that none of these substances have been shown effective in testing. Or that a single molecule is always responsible for the effects. There is less money to be made herbal remedies and less control of claims. As a result there are fewer studies into their effects. Just the same there have been many studies (though far less than of prescription meds) and they OFTEN show benefits vs placebo not rarely.

Re:Not really, no

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

If you've ever been to Africa, you'll know this. The reason you drink only beer, no matter your objections and thoughts on the matter is that you're relatively sure it won't infect you with an illness. Drinking water from a pond in the jungle is Russian roulette. Drinking water offered by inhabitants of a village is asking for poison.

Even today, in remote parts of Africa you drink either bottled water (which you check before you drink it), or beer. Nothing else. You just can't trust it.

And let's not talk about the food.

Re:Not really, no

[shaitand]

Citation for what exactly? I didn't say anything that isn't widely known and easily findable with a simple google search. My examples can also be verified with simple searching. Of course my statements regarding herbs and contraindications are easy enough to find in the PDR. If you have trouble distinguishing noise from signal then try walking into a GNC and picking up a bottle then taking it to the counter.

GNC regularly distributes a large compendium of what, if any, studies have been conducted on the herbs in the supplements they carry or their (suspected) active ingredients. They only have basics, summary of conclusions, basic type of study (sample size, single or double blind, etc). If you want more detail you need to get more detailed with the question. GNC should be able to provide you with enough information to find the full text of any individual study yourself.

Of course your results at GNC are going to vary with the competence of the person at the counter. If you get an incompetent they will probably let you grab the book and search yourself.

I think a lot of the myths are supported with broad negative conclusions drawn from properly narrow studies. For instance a study on Ginko Biloba came out recently which showed that it wasn't effective at restoring memory function to the elderly who had already lost function. Previous studies showed that Ginko enhanced memory function in adults (without control for memory loss). These are completely different things but people immediately jumped on the Ginko is debunked now train.

Note: I'm not actually saying that Ginko is effective. I don't use any drugs (herbal or prescription) outside those in a carefully controlled diet unless I have an immediate medical need with risks that override the crapshoot that comes with haphazardly tossing chemicals into the delicate and poorly understood chemical balance that is my body.

Re:Not really, no

[hal2814]

No, it's the alcohol content and relatively low PH (usually in the 4-5 range) that makes beer so unfriendly for pathogens. There are even styles of beer like Berliner Weisse that are not traditionally boiled but are still far safer to drink than water of unknown quality.

Re:Not really, no

[JasterBobaMereel]

Beer : contains alcohol - which kills many water borne pathogens, is made by boiling water, which kills most of the rest

Medieval Europe and colonial North America drank large amounts of "Small Beer" Low alcohol beer, instead of water for precisely this reason, it was simply but very effectively abiotic

All the Nubian's added to this was that they stumbled across an ingredient that made it anti-biotic as well...

In the Ancient Near-East (Sumeria/Babylon etc) they drank Mead - Honey beer that is also anti-biotic ....

Re:Not really, no

[tverbeek]

If a substance is potent enough to have an effect on your health, it's a drug, and is subject to regulation by the FDA.

This reasoning is about as sound as "Of course marijuana is bad for you: it's illegal!"

Until last year tobacco was not regulated by the FDA, and I'm pretty sure the active ingredient in it was known to be "potent enough to have an effect on your health" even way back in the dark ages of 2008. To say nothing of caffeine, which is not regulated by the FDA as a drug but as a food ingredient or dietary supplement... like an "herbal".

Re:Not really, no

[dargaud]

You are wrong in attributing the drinkability of beer to alcohol: beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill most pathogens (2 to 8% in traditional beers). It does so thanks to competition with yeast. You have many germs in your brew when you start it, but if all goes well only yeast grows and eliminates the competition. Sometimes a brew can go bad where the yeast is eliminated by other germs, but then it's rather easy to tell: it doesn't smell, looks or taste like beer, so you don't drink it. With water you can't tell.

Re:Not really, no

[John Hasler]

I doubt there was empirical testing going on here. As the parent said, the beer sometimes helped people get better so they used it.

That is empirical testing. The herbalists would have done better to stick to it. Unfortunately, they developed bogus theories.

And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri.

Well, no. Some of it is toxic.

Re:Not really, no

[hal2814]

You drop a pathogen into a solution that's 2%-8% alcohol with a PH around 4-5 that's had most of its sugars and oxygen consumed and tell me how it does. Alcohol isn't the whole story but it's a big part of it. The yeast more or less have a scorched earth policy towards the unfermented beer. They use aerobic respiration as long as there is oxygen available so they can multiply. When there is no more oxygen, they'll resort to anaerobic respiration and eat up all of the sugars and leave behind alcohol and CO2. When that is done, they'll go dormant for a while but if left in the brew too long will even resort to autolysis and start eating each other. They consume almost anything and everything that can be consumed and leave their environment quite inhospitable afterwards to anything but bacteria like lactobacillus or less picky yeast strains like brettanomyces. Even infected beer is generally safe to drink because of the type of infection that would have to be present to survive the harsh post-fermentation environment.

Re:Not really, no

[asliarun]

I like what Dara O' Briain has to say about it: "Oh herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years. Indeed it has, and then we tested it all and the stuff that worked became -medicine-. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri. So knock yourselves out."

A lot of what you said is very true - herbal medicine in general is not as systematic or scientific as modern medicine.

However, to make a blanket statement that all herbal medicine is hit-and-miss, voodoo magic, and unscientific is also distorting the truth, and based on ignorance of our past. Science is not the fiefdom of the Greco-Roman system we have been following in the last couple of hundred years. Systematic and scientific study has indeed been followed by many old cultures, albeit not to the level of sophistication that we currently follow. Nonetheless, you cannot just trash it completely.

Look at what Sushruta used to do in India in 800BC for example.

To quote the wikipedia article:

"The Sushruta Samhita contains 184 chapters and description of 1120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants, a detailed study on Anatomy, 64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations based on animal sources."

Not just medicine, he has written extensively about surgery, especially plastic surgery, and some of his techniques and instruments are still being used today.

He wasn't alone, you can also read about Charaka.

What I am basically trying to say is that the basic principles of science such as logic and experimental proof did not get magically invented a couple of hundred years ago. Most scientists in the old days were let down by a lack of infrastructure and lack of mature manufacturing processes, among other things. They were not let down because their approach was unscientific or unsystematic. Don't trash herbal medicine just because the active chemical ingredient of a herb has not been isolated (because of lack of chemical or process know-how). No system of medicine (even herbal medicine) can withstand the test of time if it was solely based on hit and trial or voodoo/magic, instead of being based on logic and method.

To put it another way, should your great grandchild trash-talk and call you a scientific neanderthal just because you used to eat fruits, vegetables, and meat instead of ingesting (isolated) protein, carb, vitamin, and fibre tablets? Forget isolating nutrients from our food, we haven't even been able to properly bio-engineer the food that we eat. Imagine how barbaric it will feel to a person 500 years from now when they realize that our generation actually needed to slaughter animals for our nutritional intake. They'll probably look at us the way we look at cannibals.

Let's see

[Exitar]

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"?

Re:I know nothing about this field of science

[digitig]

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.

Perhaps you didn't understand the bit in the summary that referred to empirical knowledge and use of antibiotics?

Either that or

[salesgeek]

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.

Re:Either that or

[teridon]

The full article notes that simple contamination wouldn't have generated enough tetracycline to match what they detected.

The extent of the [osteon] labeling suggests that the population received tetracycline during osteon mineralization, which occurs during periods of ~80 days. This finding contradicts the notion that the osteons were labeled by a one time event of bacterial contamination of grains or foodstuffs. [...]In contrast, surface inoculation of cracked and water-treated grains would produce tetracycline, but in low yields compared with liquid fermentation

So, the population must have cultured this brew to generate enough tetracycline. Whether it was deliberate (because they knew it had health benefits) or just a happy accident that they kept using the right culture is unanswered.

Re:Either that or

[Jeppe Salvesen]

The question is then if there is a higher dose of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease than those who died from accidents and violence. If there is a higher concentration of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease, then this suggests they knew about the healing properties of their beer. After all, the body is better at defeating infections when sober than when you're hammered so not drinking beer while being ill would be a better choice had they not known of the medicinal properties of the beer.

Re:I know nothing about this field of science

[DarkKnightRadick]

What surprises is me is the complete elitism of knowledge that shows its ugly head when an article like this pops up. "Oh they didn't have modern science so they must have been complete n00bs and were just drinking 'magic beer' that sometimes helped." This is completely regardless of the fact that this is already centuries after Plato and Hippocrates or any other ancient looks into philosophy and medicine.

Could it possibly be, as you and the article suggest, that they had empirical knowledge of what they were doing? God forbid if that were true! /sarcasm

Re:to try and cure him

[Anonymous Coward]

to try and cure him... to try to cure him.... which sounds better to you?

The latter... if you're Hannibal Lector.

Re:I know nothing about this field of science

[gtall]

"must have been complete n00bs", well....they were called Nubians.

This isn't surprising

[geogob]

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.

Why is this surprising anyone?

[tpstigers]

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.

Re:I know nothing about this field of science

[marcello_dl]

In fact Science is a protocol to make the most out of observations, but empirical knowledge is the superset of experimental knowledge. Science supersedes it but empirical knowledge works for humans and animals since the dawn of time.

Besides, Science is about experimentation, publication, replication and validation of result, theories forming or being demolished because of such results.

But now?

We have NDAs, patents, trade secrets, corporate manipulation of the media,this is not the scientific process, this is a religion in disguise. "Believe our results".

To the guy dissing herbs, the origin of the medicament is irrelevant all it matters is its efficiency. If penicillin can cure and amanita muscaria can kill, natural stuff can have dramatic effects on health, obviously.

Re:Obligatory...

[hal2814]

What about you? You didn't tell me you were gonna scream "Black Rage!" I nearly pissed myself!

Bacterial drug resistance

[skeffstone]

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?

Re:What...

[fey000]

The average life expectancy we have today is significantly higher than it was back then. As such, it may well be that these Nubians never even experienced the consequences of liver damage outside a few extreme cases.

Re:Obligatory...

[sumdumass]

If it was a linux distro, it would be spelled Gnubian or Kgnubian something similar while sporting a picture of some bearded goat thing playing ball with a penguin.

Damn Fools

[OldHawk777]

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!

And That's Not All!

[DynaSoar]

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.