Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm develin a truck recording, and
Speaker 1: today we have a fun kind of summary episode. We're
Speaker 1: gonna enjoy ourselves a little bit. And the idea for
Speaker 1: this episode has been brewing not to make a terrible pun,
Speaker 1: for quite some time, actually, since Katie and I did
Speaker 1: an episode on chocolate way back in the fall and
Speaker 1: a few years ago, just in case you missed that
Speaker 1: episode or you want a little context on it, a
Speaker 1: few years ago, researchers at Hershey Chocolate and the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania Museum did some chemical analysis on these Honduran
Speaker 1: pottery shirts dating from about four BC, and they were
Speaker 1: these long neck jars from Puerto Escondido, and they showed
Speaker 1: they ended up showing traces of THEO broh mean, which
Speaker 1: is the fingerprint compound of coco, which is of course
Speaker 1: why it came up in the chocolate episode in the
Speaker 1: first place. Yeah, so later myans and Aztecs used that cacao,
Speaker 1: the cocaw beans to make a frothy chocolate e drink,
Speaker 1: adding tasty mixers like honey, chilies, flowers, and a nato,
Speaker 1: but the Puerto Escondido didn't show residues from any of
Speaker 1: those common additives, just that theobromine, suggesting that this wasn't
Speaker 1: an early chocolate drink made from cacao beans. It was
Speaker 1: actually an early fermented beverage made from the cocaw pulp.
Speaker 1: That cocow pulp from us naturally as well, producing a
Speaker 1: five to seven percent alcohol drink. So animals have been
Speaker 1: indulging in that for time immemorial. But we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking a little bit about the human side of it.
Speaker 1: So drinks that people made on purpose. That Honduran discovery
Speaker 1: actually pushed back human cocaw consumption five hundred years and
Speaker 1: interestingly also created this offshoot modern beer, which we have
Speaker 1: of a cup of today. We're going to be sampling
Speaker 1: that while we podcast. We'll we'll sort of rate it
Speaker 1: at the end, or maybe just talk about it a
Speaker 1: little bit and talk about some other historical drinks. So here,
Speaker 1: let's give it acceptively. Now, Oh, it's pretty good, not bad,
Speaker 1: all right, So we do have a method to this madness,
Speaker 1: though we haven't just gone after every historical find of
Speaker 1: alcohol in the past century or whatever. And it's not
Speaker 1: just an excuse to drink beer. We we have we
Speaker 1: have an order behind all of this. Yeah, we're going
Speaker 1: to kind of split up this podcast a little bit
Speaker 1: into ancient alcohols or those truly ancient finds that were
Speaker 1: found as residues and identified through fingerprint compounds. Like Sarah mentions,
Speaker 1: the liquid is all gone exactly, there's no liquid to
Speaker 1: work with. But by performing a series of chemical tests,
Speaker 1: including mass spectrometry tests UM and other things like that,
Speaker 1: research is can i D based components of beer, wine
Speaker 1: and other spirits. Yeah, so they're testing the gunk that's
Speaker 1: on the bottom of the pottery bowl or the bronze vessel,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk more about that in this episode.
Speaker 1: And then gunk is a scientific term. Yes, that's what
Speaker 1: we're gonna be using. And then in a later episode
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about old alcohol and aged alcohol,
Speaker 1: so basically things where there's still some liquid, where it's
Speaker 1: still drinkable or I mean, you can define that how
Speaker 1: you want. It may not be that tasty anymore, but
Speaker 1: alcohol that can be identified by what's still in the bottle.
Speaker 1: So these are hundreds of years old or even less
Speaker 1: than that, rather than thousands of years old, so researchers
Speaker 1: can pop them open still study them chemically, but also
Speaker 1: sample them. But for now we're going to stick to
Speaker 1: those older, gunkier alcohol varieties. And before we get to
Speaker 1: talk about some of those specific fines, how did humans
Speaker 1: start brewing alcohol in the first place? Well, fruit actually
Speaker 1: from us naturally, right, so many animals were partaking of
Speaker 1: that even before where we were creating alcohol on purpose monkeys, birds, elephants,
Speaker 1: you name it. But there's a big jump between that
Speaker 1: eating a fermented fruit for a buzz and as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: purposely creating fermenting beverages. So unfortunately, though, since those early
Speaker 1: beverages would have been brewed and consumed and bio degradable
Speaker 1: vessels like gourds, we don't really have evidence of them.
Speaker 1: We do know this though. The oldest barley beer came
Speaker 1: from Iran's Sza Gross Mountains and it's from around thirty
Speaker 1: four hundred b C. The oldest grape wine is also
Speaker 1: from Zo Gross and it originated around fifty four hundred BC.
Speaker 1: And the earliest of any known alcohol came from China
Speaker 1: and it dates from around seven thousand b C. And
Speaker 1: so we're going to tell you a little bit more
Speaker 1: on that to start out with exactly So, until fairly recently,
Speaker 1: the oldest known alcohol came from Iran again, and it
Speaker 1: was about seven thousand, four hundred years old. But China
Speaker 1: was a really good place to go looking for earlier
Speaker 1: evidence of alcohol, in part because people started making pottery
Speaker 1: there thousands of years before they did in the Near East.
Speaker 1: It's quite a startling different difference, in fact, probably about
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand BC in China versus six thousand BC in
Speaker 1: the Near East. And pottery, I think we mentioned this before,
Speaker 1: is great for for testing for traces of alcohol. It
Speaker 1: absorbs liquid into its pores, and it's also just really
Speaker 1: pretty much indestructible, so it's great for searching for those
Speaker 1: fingerprint compounds. And that's exactly what Patrick McGovern of the
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania Museum did. He took a look at
Speaker 1: high necked pottery jars, which were excavated from the Neolithic
Speaker 1: village of jia Who in northern China and now gia
Speaker 1: Who had already proven to be a treasure trove of
Speaker 1: ancient materials containing some of China's oldest pottery evidence of
Speaker 1: early rice domestication and the oldest known playable musical instrument
Speaker 1: made from a bird's wingbone. But when McGovern found traces
Speaker 1: of alcohol in the pottery, shards Gia who also the
Speaker 1: came the home of the world's oldest brew, a triple
Speaker 1: combo of beer, wine and mead that's about nine thousand
Speaker 1: years old, which sounds kind of strange, doesn't it, Beer
Speaker 1: wine and meade. McGovern calls it a neolithic grog. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it is honey mead, rice grapes, and hawthorn fruit, So
Speaker 1: quite a combination. And we're gonna be talking about another
Speaker 1: combination right now. The cool thing about studying ancient alcohol
Speaker 1: is that many of the samples that you can test
Speaker 1: for are already in museums, And it wasn't until about
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, really the late nineteen eighties that scientists
Speaker 1: started seriously trying to identify the contents of ancient vessels,
Speaker 1: not just by their shape and size, I know we've
Speaker 1: talked about in foura before, but by the chemical makeup
Speaker 1: of what's inside. And they actually have the technology to
Speaker 1: be able to do so. So case and point, the
Speaker 1: tomb of King Midas or potentially his father. I was
Speaker 1: suppressed learned King Midus was a real guy. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was too, who was not aware anyway? King Midas or
Speaker 1: his father's tomb was excavated in central Turkey way back
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty seven, and it was a very impressive
Speaker 1: fine excavators opened the tomb. It was kind of a
Speaker 1: king tut situation almost. There was a body laid out
Speaker 1: among these beautiful blue and purple claws, and the whole
Speaker 1: scene was surrounded by bronze vessels, specifically a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty seven bronze bats and jugs and bowls, and all
Speaker 1: of them two thousand, seven hundred years old. An interesting
Speaker 1: note on the gold though, there wasn't any gold there. No,
Speaker 1: they were bronze but filled with a golden residue, which
Speaker 1: is what we're interested in. So forty years later, McGovern
Speaker 1: is testing the samples for specific fingerprint compounds such as
Speaker 1: tartaric acid, which would come from Middle Eastern grapes or
Speaker 1: be indicative of Middle Eastern grapes, bees, wax um which
Speaker 1: would be indicative of honey mead, and calcium, a slate
Speaker 1: or beer stone, which would indicate the presence of barley beer.
Speaker 1: So again, like the Chinese find, Midas's brew must have
Speaker 1: been a combo of grape wine, honey, meat, and barley beer.
Speaker 1: And it was at this point that McGovern started to
Speaker 1: get curious about the taste of a beverage like that,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't sound very good, does it. I thought
Speaker 1: it sounded okay. I don't know if that's some fruity essence.
Speaker 1: Honey always sounds good to me. I'm I'm not exactly
Speaker 1: sure what mead tastes like anyway, but I'm just imagining
Speaker 1: if you mixed your glass of wine and your bottle
Speaker 1: of beer together. Oh yeah, not very good. Not very
Speaker 1: McGovern was curious, though, He wanted to know if there
Speaker 1: was something better sounding than just nixing your store bought
Speaker 1: bruised together, so he announced a competition among microbrewers who
Speaker 1: were attending a dinner at the museum and challenged them
Speaker 1: with recreating the brew. Dog fish Head Brewery one out
Speaker 1: and McGovern helped them create a recreation of Midas's drink.
Speaker 1: So just a cool note on this, The bittering agent
Speaker 1: used in this drink wasn't hops, which was only introduced
Speaker 1: to Europe around seven a D but saffron and I
Speaker 1: just made some Moroccan food recently that required having to
Speaker 1: buy some saffron, and it is literally the world's most
Speaker 1: expensive spice. So this would have been some pretty high
Speaker 1: end beer for sure. And it's interesting, much like the
Speaker 1: beer we're tasting now. Dog fish Head did a recreation
Speaker 1: of this Mida spear called what is it called Midas
Speaker 1: Touch Midas Touch. Yeah, And there was this article in
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian, the August two thousand eleven issue, so the
Speaker 1: most recent issue about this whole process of dog fish
Speaker 1: Head recreating these brews. And there's a lot on the
Speaker 1: government in his career. And my favorite quote from this
Speaker 1: article was a quote from a colleague of McGovern's named
Speaker 1: Alexei vron Rich, who is an expert on pre Columbian Peru,
Speaker 1: and he said, quote, I keep telling people that beer
Speaker 1: is more important than armies when it comes to understanding people,
Speaker 1: and that's true. It really does teach us not just
Speaker 1: about the society, but their agricultural abilities, their trade, their
Speaker 1: religio and what sort of traditions they had. And it
Speaker 1: even teaches us a little bit about what kind of
Speaker 1: medical knowledge they had, which I found to be a
Speaker 1: really interesting discovery in this podcast that beer or alcohol
Speaker 1: was even known to very ancient people as having some
Speaker 1: sort of beneficial properties to it. And it brings us
Speaker 1: to the next entry on this list, which is an
Speaker 1: ancient beer. And just to give you a little background
Speaker 1: on this, for more than twenty years, every University anthropologist
Speaker 1: George arm Lagos and his team had been studying bones
Speaker 1: dated to between a d. Three fifty and five fifty
Speaker 1: from Nubia, an ancient kingdom south of ancient Egypt along
Speaker 1: the Nile River. And this was long ago, maybe the
Speaker 1: early eighties, when they found traces of the antibiotic tetracycline
Speaker 1: in the bones. Now today, tetracycline is actually used from
Speaker 1: everything from acne flare ups to urinary tract infections, and
Speaker 1: it only came into commercial use about half a entry ago,
Speaker 1: because after all, Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin back in right. So,
Speaker 1: of course this could have an impact on the study
Speaker 1: of the relationship between microbes and antibiotics, but it also
Speaker 1: makes you wonder how did the tetracycline get into these
Speaker 1: bones in the first place. It was in more than
Speaker 1: of the bones. They were looking at including those of
Speaker 1: a toddler. So Armlogus, who specializes in reconstructing ancient diets,
Speaker 1: proposed that the Nubians made the tetracycline in their beer.
Speaker 1: But the way he reached that conclusion is pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: So tetracycline is produced by a soil bacteria that's called streptomiases,
Speaker 1: and that bacteria really thrives in warm, arid climates like
Speaker 1: that of ancient Nubia. So according to arm Lagos, the
Speaker 1: ancient Nubians store their grain in mud ben so there
Speaker 1: was a pretty high chance that the grain could have
Speaker 1: been contaminated by this bacteria. And in looking at how
Speaker 1: the grain was used, they came across a recipe for beer,
Speaker 1: because back then beer was probably a tastier way of
Speaker 1: consuming the grain rather than eating it. So it's pretty
Speaker 1: likely that the contaminated grain in turn contaminated a batch
Speaker 1: of beer. And there you go. So once the Nubians
Speaker 1: noticed that that beer made them feel better and cured
Speaker 1: maybe some bacterial infections they might have had, they started
Speaker 1: to propagate it. Now you may wonder could they have
Speaker 1: actually had the skills to propagate that, And researchers have
Speaker 1: kind of answered this. They said that they probably did
Speaker 1: know how to propagate beer because they were doing the
Speaker 1: same thing with wine and streptomyces produces a golden colored
Speaker 1: bacterial colony that would have floated on top of the beer,
Speaker 1: and since ancient cultures revered gold, this was probably another
Speaker 1: reason that they encouraged propagation of it too. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: and arm Lagos co authored a study about this with
Speaker 1: chemist Mark Nelson, which was published in the American Journal
Speaker 1: of Physical Anthropology in June two thousand tents, so just
Speaker 1: last year. And to prove that that antibiotic beer was possible,
Speaker 1: Armilagos actually had as grad students try to make it,
Speaker 1: which I think sounds really fun. But it wasn't beer
Speaker 1: as we think of it today. This this beer from
Speaker 1: the past. It was more like a serial gruel our,
Speaker 1: Malagas explains, and a quote of his and wired describes
Speaker 1: the taste. Thus he says, my students said that it
Speaker 1: was quote not bad, but it is like a sour
Speaker 1: porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid
Speaker 1: off and also eaten the gruel, and so children would
Speaker 1: have probably been allowed to eat the stuff left over
Speaker 1: the bottom of the vat too. I think that not
Speaker 1: bad quote requires like a certain kind of intonation depending
Speaker 1: on how you're gonna are gonna see. It doesn't sound
Speaker 1: good to me. Maybe depends on your taste level, I
Speaker 1: guess though. It reminded me though, if the dog fish
Speaker 1: had founder. He actually described that to modern palettes, a
Speaker 1: lot of these ancient brews wouldn't be good at all.
Speaker 1: They would have these thick lumps in them, and people
Speaker 1: actually drank them with straws to filter all of that out.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if I found a lump in
Speaker 1: my drink unless it's bubble tea, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: just imagining, like if you pour a beer in oatmeal.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that's what it sounds to me when he
Speaker 1: says a serial gruel. But maybe not. Maybe I'm off
Speaker 1: on that. So we're not sure why the antibiotic beer
Speaker 1: secret was lost to us. But our melogus is looking
Speaker 1: for the tetracycling and bones of different cultures and he's
Speaker 1: found evidences Latest fourteen hundred a D. So this is
Speaker 1: still kind of a developing story, alright. So moving on,
Speaker 1: we have another medicinal sort of alcohol, although this time
Speaker 1: it is wine rather than beer, or rather than beer
Speaker 1: poured in oatmeal is descraged it. So in nineteen German
Speaker 1: archaeologists found a flakey yellow residue in a jar found
Speaker 1: in the tomb belonging to King Scorpion, the first in Egypt,
Speaker 1: and that tomb was built at about thirty one fifty BC,
Speaker 1: so pretty ancient as far as the fines we've talked
Speaker 1: about so far go. Working with a German group in
Speaker 1: two thousand one, McGovern, who we keep on bringing up here,
Speaker 1: determined that a residue had contained salt crystals that were
Speaker 1: left behind when tartaric acid in grapes breaks down, and
Speaker 1: that was evident that the wine, which is Egypt's oldest wine,
Speaker 1: had been kept in the jar. But he didn't stop there.
Speaker 1: McGovern and his colleagues used several chemical techniques to tease
Speaker 1: out the other biological additives and match them two known plants.
Speaker 1: The tests that they performed indicated the presence of tree
Speaker 1: resin and also several herbs. The test they did, though
Speaker 1: weren't precise enough to figure out the exact herbs that
Speaker 1: were used, but probably things like bombs, senna, coriander, mint, sage,
Speaker 1: and time, all of which show up in ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: medical writings as treatments for a number of ailments. So
Speaker 1: McGovern says, while these ingredients would have added flavor, they
Speaker 1: were most likely chosen for their medicinal benefits. The jar
Speaker 1: apparently also had an ancient label of sorts, maybe a
Speaker 1: wine label we could call it, that identified it as
Speaker 1: an herbal wine. Alright, So going back though, papyrus records
Speaker 1: from is far back as eighteen fifty BC do make
Speaker 1: reference to medicinal lines being used to treat various ailments,
Speaker 1: and somehow the ancient Egyptians figured out that the alcohol
Speaker 1: would preserve those herbal remedies and make them more potent.
Speaker 1: It was a good delivery system essentially. But this new
Speaker 1: discovery pushes back the use of medicinal lines fifteen hundred years, which,
Speaker 1: according to National Geographic predates the advent of Egyptian vineyards.
Speaker 1: Even so, that date means that these lines were obviously
Speaker 1: not made in Egypt or grown in Egypt. At least,
Speaker 1: they were instead imports from the Jordan River valley, which
Speaker 1: obviously influenced the Egyptian farm a copia. These findings were
Speaker 1: published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Speaker 1: in April two thousand nine, and again with like the beer.
Speaker 1: Researchers are still testing these wine medicine recipes and trying
Speaker 1: to figure out why Egyptians found them useful and if
Speaker 1: they could still be useful today if you hit on
Speaker 1: the right recipe, could they help med some modern day elements? Well,
Speaker 1: I think that about the antibiotic one too. That an
Speaker 1: antibiotic could be delivered through a beer is kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting twist on the pharmaceutical industry. Would probably make
Speaker 1: a lot of people want to take their medicine probably, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but well that's a major problem people not finishing your
Speaker 1: course of antibiotics. But yeah, I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
Speaker 1: We promised though that we would discuss this drink a
Speaker 1: little bit, which is a dog fish head and it
Speaker 1: is uh the same company that made the Midas Touch
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, and works a lot with McGovern, the
Speaker 1: archaeologist who keeps popping up. And it's called Via Broma
Speaker 1: and it is the recreated version of the ancient Honduran
Speaker 1: drink we started out with. And they couldn't use fresh
Speaker 1: cacao fruit though from Honduras because it would go bad.
Speaker 1: They've got to be able to make large enough batches
Speaker 1: to sell this stuff. They're based in Delaware. I managed
Speaker 1: to find it in Atlanta, so they can't have this
Speaker 1: um spoiling fruit as the base of it. Instead, they
Speaker 1: used Aztec chocolate, nibs and powder, and the bitterness is
Speaker 1: offset by honey and corn. I was expecting it to
Speaker 1: be pretty bitter because of the chocolate, but it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not at all. I don't taste the chili after
Speaker 1: taste though I don't either, but I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: very good at identifying specific flavors. I don't think I
Speaker 1: am either. Maybe we're a bad pair to be doing this,
Speaker 1: and very refined palate. But I do like it, I
Speaker 1: can say I. Usually I was telling Sarah, I don't
Speaker 1: like things that are fruity or spicy or otherwise flavors.
Speaker 1: Really like things that are chocolate, at least if they're
Speaker 1: alcohol based. But this doesn't seem that way. It's not
Speaker 1: overpowering at all. And conveniently, it's called the drink of
Speaker 1: the God. That's what the abroma means. So yeah, not
Speaker 1: too bad, and I mean that not in a rule
Speaker 1: the air kind of way. Yes, this is nothing like
Speaker 1: beer and oatmeal, and I'm really sorry if we created
Speaker 1: a bad visual for anyone, but we are going to
Speaker 1: leave you on that note. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately if
Speaker 1: you're interested in trying this beer. We're gonna now move
Speaker 1: on to a listener mail. So, in keeping with the
Speaker 1: idea of the Ancient America's since we just talked about
Speaker 1: a Honduran influenced beer, we have a three part listener
Speaker 1: mail from listeners Debbie and John and they actually sent
Speaker 1: us three postcards from the Cookey Amounts because we did
Speaker 1: a podcast on that recently and inspired them to visit.
Speaker 1: And so I'm not gonna be able to read the
Speaker 1: whole thing because it's kind of long, but I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a couple parts of it. I'm going to
Speaker 1: read what they just the introduction and then what they saw.
Speaker 1: So she says, Hi, ladies, I'm sending three postcards of
Speaker 1: our trip to Kahkia, so you can see the photo
Speaker 1: view of the largest mound as it looks today, as
Speaker 1: well as an artist rendering of how the area looked
Speaker 1: when it was an ancient city. We were inspired to
Speaker 1: take a road trip there by your podcast on the
Speaker 1: city as well as a co worker who mentioned that
Speaker 1: his uncle was an archaeologist at the University of Illinois.
Speaker 1: The site was very interesting, with many displays of items
Speaker 1: that were unearthed during the construction in the area and digs.
Speaker 1: Although I always thought I would need to go outside
Speaker 1: the US to see the history of a couple hundred
Speaker 1: years old, I never knew I lived just a few
Speaker 1: hundred miles from such a large ancient city. So thanks
Speaker 1: for making us aware. We've really heard from a lot
Speaker 1: of people who have gone ahead and made a trip
Speaker 1: to Kahokia because they don't live too far and they
Speaker 1: some of have even driven by before but have finally
Speaker 1: decided to pull over and see it. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: looks like it's worth it. That photo on the first postcard,
Speaker 1: which shows the mounts today is amazing. I really like
Speaker 1: the artist rendition too, with the all the people and
Speaker 1: buildings surrounding it too. Yeah. We may have to take
Speaker 1: some photos of these to put on Facebook for everyone
Speaker 1: to check out. But thank you Debbie and John for
Speaker 1: sending these to us. I'm letting us know about your trip.
Speaker 1: We appreciate that if you have any exciting travels that
Speaker 1: you want to share with us maybe based on podcasts,
Speaker 1: but they don't necessarily have to be based on previous podcasts.
Speaker 1: Please go ahead and email us at History podcast at
Speaker 1: house to works dot com, or you can look us
Speaker 1: up on Twitter at Miston History or on Facebook. And
Speaker 1: in the meantime, if you want to learn a little
Speaker 1: bit more about how beer works, we've you have an
Speaker 1: article on that topic. You can find it by searching
Speaker 1: for how beer Works on the homepage at www dot
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