For much of the last three decades, anthropologist George Armelagos has been trying to explain how mummies that date from an ancient kingdom in Nubia—the area south of Egypt that’s located in present-day Sudan—got so much of the antibiotic tetracycline in their bones. Since scientists didn’t synthesize antibiotics like that one until the 20th century (and these bones date back to between 350 to 550 A.D.), finding a buildup in ancient bones screams out “contamination.”

Armelagos and his colleagues longed to prove that it wasn’t, and in a study out in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the team argues that the find is no fluke. Nubians got antibiotics into their systems by drinking beer, and lots of it, and from an early age.

How? Thanks to the help of a kind of bacteria called Streptomyces.

Common in soil, Strep bacteria produce tetracycline antibiotics to kill off other, competing bacteria. Grains that are stored underground can easily become moldy with Streptomyces contamination, though these bacteria would only produce small amounts of tetracycline on their own when left to sit or baked into bread. Only when people fermented the grain would tetracycline production explode. Nubians both ate the fermented grains as gruel and used it to make beer. [Discovery News]

By dissolving bone samples in acid, team member Mark Nelson verified that the tetracycline was present in the ancient samples and not the result of modern contamination. And to prove that antibiotic beer is possible, the scientists made some.

More info:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/09/03/accidental-awesomeness-ancient-nubians-made-antibiotic-beer/

@microbrewing