Chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Sudanese Nubians who lived nearly 2000 years ago shows they were ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline on a regular basis, likely from a special brew of beer. The find is the strongest yet that antibiotics were previously discovered by humans before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

"I'm going to ask Alexander Fleming to hand back his Nobel Prize," joked chemist Mark Nelson, who works on developing new tetracyclines at Paratek Pharmaceuticals and is lead author of the paper published June in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Nelson found large amounts of tetracycline in the bones tested from the ancient population, which lived in the Nubian kingdom (present day Sudan) between 250 A.D. and 550 A.D. and left no written record.

"The bones of these ancient people were saturated with tetracycline, showing that they had been taking it for a long time," Nelson said in a press release August 30. "I'm convinced that they had the science of fermentation under control and were purposely producing the drug."

"This discovery will provide a whole new framework for understanding the relationship between microbes and antibiotics," said anthropologist Dennis Van Gerven of University of Colorado at Boulder. "There might have been other populations that were also doing the same thing, anywhere that there were these microbes. This is going to drive other scientists to start this search, and that is incredibly important."

Scientists have suspected this population was ingesting tetracycline since they first noticed a florescent yellow-green appearance of the bones under ultraviolet light, indicative of tetracycline.

"When we reported that in 1981, it was met with a lot of skepticism," said anthropologist George Armelagos of Emory University, who made the original discovery and is co-author of this new study. "If you were unwrapping an Egyptian mummy and suddenly it had Ray-Ban sunglasses on it, that's what it was like with us."

Tetracycline latches on to calcium and gets deposited in bones, which is how it can be detected it in fossils. The ultraviolet light technique said little about how much tetracycline there was in the bone, and it was hard to convince others it wasn't simply a produced of microbial contamination of the bones, or a one-time beer event.

Nelson was able to solve the problem by dissolving the bones in hydrogen flouride, the nastiest acid on the planet, he said. He was able to clearly identify the amount and identity of the tetracycline in the bones. It was in all the bones, including those of a four-year-old child.

Armelagos, who specializes in reconstructing ancient diets, proposed that the Nubians made the tetracycline in their beer. There is evidence they knew how to make it, he says. Tetracycline is produced by a soil bacteria called streptomyces, which is how it was discovered by modern society in the 1940s. Streptomyces thrives in warm, arid regions such as that of ancient Nubia, and likely contaminated a batch of beer.

They must have known how to propagate the beer because they were doing it to make wine, Nelson says. There was also so much of it in their bones that it is near impossible that the tetracycline-laced beer was a fluke event.

To make sure that making the antibiotic beer was possible, Armelagos had his graduate students give it a try.

"What they were making wasn't like a Bud Light but a cereal gruel," Armelagos said. "My students said that it was 'not bad,' but it is like a sour porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid off and also eaten the gruel."

The Nubians likely noticed the antibiotics cured them of bacterial infection. It may have had negative effects as well: If taken in too large quantities the antibiotic can also cause iron deficiency because it latches on to the iron in the body.

Streptomyces produces a golden-colored bacterial colony that would have floated on top of the beer and likely encouraged its propagation. Gold was revered by the ancient cultures.

When and why the antibiotic beer secret was lost is a mystery. It is not the first technology to disappear with the disappearance of cultures. Armelagos is continuing to look for the tetracycline in the bones of different cultures. He says he has already found preliminary evidence it is in bones of people who date to as late as 1300 to 1400 A.D.

Armelagos hopes this find might also help explain why animals have been found with antibiotic resistance in Northern Africa where there is no previous evidence of antibiotics being used.

About a quarter of the grain in Africa is still made into beer, Armelagos says.

*Images: 1) Ancient Egyptian figures show workers grinding, baking and fermenting grain to make beer and bread./**Andreas Praefcke. 2) Green florescence in Nubian skeletons indicating tetracycline-labeled bone./Armelagos. *

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