"Imagine if you're unwrapping a mummy, and all of a sudden, you see a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses on it," Armelagos said. "Initially, we thought it was a product of modern technology."
The modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin,
Ancient Nubians Drank Antibiotic-Laced Beer
A group of people who lived nearly 2,000 years ago in Sudanese Nubia took doses of tetracycline -- through their beer.
People have been using antibiotics for nearly 2,000 years, suggests a new study, which found large doses of tetracycline embedded in the bones of ancient African mummies.
What's more, they probably got it through beer, and just about everyone appears to have drank it consistently throughout their lifetimes, beginning early in childhood.
While the modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin, the new findings suggest that people knew how to fight infections much earlier than that -- even if they didn't actually know what bacteria were.
Some of the first people to use antibiotics, according to the research, may have lived along the shores of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia, which spans the border of modern Egypt and Sudan.
"Given the amount of tetracycline there, they had to know what they were doing," said co-author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."
Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline -- an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.
"Imagine if you're unwrapping a mummy, and all of a sudden, you see a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses on it," Armelagos said. "Initially, we thought it was a product of modern technology."
Read more at news.discovery.com
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