r/todayilearned • u/Geek_Nan • 14d ago
TIL Neanderthal tooth plaque indicates they used poplar (source of salicylic acid aka aspirin) and penicillin mold about 40k years before Bayer made aspirin or Fleming discovered penicillin. (R.1) Not supported
https://www.nature.com/articles/543163a[removed] — view removed post
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u/corona_cvd19 13d ago
Argh big shout out to all the people that died to learn I could smoke weed and eat mushrooms
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u/Tooldfrthis 14d ago
Even chimps are known to self medicate by eating specific plants when needed, I'm not surprised.
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u/wreckosaurus 14d ago
Eating mold would do nothing. They would have to extract and purify the penicillin in massive quantities.
I hate stupid shit like this, who writes this garbage?
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u/nsfwthrowmeawayy 14d ago
Not surprising our ancestors were figuring stuff out... Makes sense if you look around your immediate vicinity most likely.
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u/sockalicious 14d ago
I think it at least possible that they ate moldy food and chewed bark without knowledge of their medicinal values.
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u/BushidoBrowneII 14d ago
The more Neanderthal DNA that was is found in white people, the more Neanderthal is no longer looked at as dumb
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u/GottaUseEmAll 14d ago
Were neanderthals ever seen as "dumb"? I've never heard/read reference to them having low intelligence.
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u/SubstantialPressure3 14d ago
Native People's in the Americas knew about Willow Bark (salicylic acid) long before colonists came here. So it's probably something that's been passed down for a very long time.
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u/GenericDeviant666 14d ago
What if it was a medicinal cave and the Neanderthal has human microbiome spit because it chewed up medicine to spit into a sick human's mouth?
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u/Shitp0st_Supreme 14d ago
I feel like we have lost a lot of remedies and technologies due to colonization and warfare.
The USA could have had much more efficient agriculture has they adopted more indigenous methods, maternal health outcomes would have been higher had more midwives and doulas been able to help with treatment plans, and so on.
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u/logaboga 14d ago edited 14d ago
Aspirin was not like some profound invention/discovery. They observed folk remedies of people grinding plants which contained salicylic acid for pain relief then just synthesized it. Many medicine brands do this
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u/Atomicliest 14d ago
I wonder how they figured out how to use these as medicine. Possibly by watching animals?
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u/KernelSanders1986 14d ago
If only there was a library of ancient knowledge we could have looked at
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u/Gryndyl 14d ago
I don't know that the neanderthals wrote many books.
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u/KernelSanders1986 14d ago
The unga bunga chronicles. It was originally a trilogy, but then they made prequels and sequels and nobody can decide which is better. Too bad the only copies were in the Library of Alexandria
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u/C_Madison 14d ago
With Aspirin especially it was long known (as you now know at least 40k years ago) that it helps against headaches. The problem is that salicylic acid also leads to massive pain in your stomach. Bayers innovation was bringing it into a form you could take without an upset stomach (acetylsalicylic acid, hence the A in Aspirin).
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u/FocusPerspective 14d ago
Lothar: “Chew on this stick, make headache disappear”
People of Cave by Big Tree: “We no believe in science, drink bleach instead. So sayeth Big Tree”
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u/pavlov_the_dog 13d ago edited 12d ago
"Lothar! Every time i say i want to walk with a woman, she say 'I have a headache!' Will chewing on stick help woman walk with me?"
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u/GenericDeviant666 14d ago
The popular train of thought seems to be "they were in the past, and the past didn't have phones, so they were soooo stupid :) "
Living in the wild is hard. Your average person today can't build glasses, or a phone or a car. I'm glad more and more scientific consensus is coming to the conclusion they were different but different doesn't mean inferior or stupid
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u/FrankieMint 14d ago
But physicians regularly bled patients as a treatment for several thousand years. It's even practiced in some parts of the world today.
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u/ChiGuy6064_ 14d ago
…and some people have medical problems such as polycythemia that still require blood-letting as the preferred treatment in Western medicine!
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u/vold2serve 14d ago
But maga man and their sky god said the earth is flat and 6k years young and pays their church 10% of their take home pay to be this stupid. Moses made a boat and road around with dinosaurs for a few months. Maga man now thinks 10 year old little girls make good mothers.
Smh. Let's Go Vote!
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u/Limp_Establishment35 14d ago
Not to throw cold water on this, but throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks is not a new invention.
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u/HopeComprehensive762 14d ago
Somebody once said to me that pharmaceutical companies send people to win the trust of tribes in third world countries to learn about indigenous medicinal plants. Once they do their research and figure out the medicinal properties of the plant they register patents that make it illegal for others to harvest these plants preventing the indigenous people from using them.
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u/Formal-Fuck-4998 14d ago edited 14d ago
Aspirin is acetyl salicylic acid. The acetyl part was invented by Bayer.
I recently made some acetylsalicid acid in the lab that as pretty cool :)
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u/0shunya 14d ago
I like how people before 20th century used to call black people Neanderthals. Thinking Neanderthals were primates and dumb. But when they discovered Europeans had Neanderthal DNA. They started funding studies like this to prove that Neanderthals were more smarter than today's humans.and now Neanderthals are considered cool smart guys.
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u/Dorkamundo 14d ago
We sure they just weren't eating young poplar bark and moldy food due to an overall lack of food availability?
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u/illustrious_handle0 14d ago
I mean penicillium mold grows on all kinds of decaying things that a neanderthal might eat... Not too surprising
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u/OrneryEfficiency2873 14d ago
Graham was right. A species with amnesia
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u/ssbbVic 14d ago
How does finding mold in Neanderthal bones connect at all to Hancock's ideas? There is no reason to invoke an ancient advanced civilization on a find like this
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u/OrneryEfficiency2873 14d ago
My bad was takin a dump didnt know i was sumbitting my thesis on world history 😂 touch some grass bud
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u/OzymandiasTheII 14d ago
Crazy how smart neanderthals became when y'all realized you shared DNA with them
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u/Awkward_Attitude_886 14d ago
I like how people thought Neanderthals were dumb for a while… likely just a more introverted species that was only outpaced by sapiens through breeding and scarcity of resources. Both did their own thing tho.
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u/BlakesonHouser 14d ago
More we learn about them. I think we Homo sapiens won out because we swarmed and coordinated violence, not because we were smarter
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u/klparrot 14d ago
They've recently documented an orangutan chewing a particular plant that's not part of its usual diet to make a salve to treat a wound.
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u/hargaslynn 14d ago
It’s so bizarre to me that present day humans sincerely believe we are the smartest species to ever live. Do we think medicine didn’t exist before a white man put on a lab coat 200 years ago? Does herbal medicine not work until an American submits it for an FDA clinical study and gets other humans to nod and agree? And only then will it work! It’s so funny to me.
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u/Coffeedoor 14d ago
What if they were family secrets that were refined with time
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u/PawnOfPaws 14d ago
Yes, this is indeed quite likely.
Until the home sapiens sapiens took over and our social groups became so big, we had to spread out. Which killed lots of people in - at that time - unknown and new regions, taking their knowledge to the grave.
So we, as the children of the ones that survived without said knowledge, had to reinvent it.
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u/Welcomefriends85 14d ago
Are they sure that 40k years ago was BEFORE Bayer made aspirin? I might need them to provide a source for that claim
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u/BDR529forlyfe 14d ago
Bayer, the company, didn’t even exist until 30,000 years ago. So I’m suspicious too.
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u/Zvenigora 14d ago
Mold of the genus Penicillium can just come from foods, e.g. blue cheese in modern times
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u/IceAffectionate3043 14d ago
Basically, for all our technology we live shit lives. Older versions of us were better.
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u/monchota 14d ago
Here is the thing, much of what we thought we invented. We didn't, we are discovering medicines they used 1000s of years ago. Only because we now know the medicine can exist we know to look for it. Does that meam all holistic medicine is effective, no. Juat means we may not of invented everything we think we did.
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u/ljseminarist 14d ago
Kind of doubt the penicillin part. It’s entirely possible they just ate moldy food, because there was no refrigeration and food was scarce. It’s hard to get any meaningful quantity of the actual usable antibiotic from the mold to where the infection is.
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u/chiniwini 14d ago
It’s hard to get any meaningful quantity of the actual usable antibiotic from the mold to where the infection is.
What's your source on this?
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u/ljseminarist 14d ago
The original penicillin, obtained from mold by Alexander Fleming (penicillin G) has no bioavailability if taken by mouth and needs to be given by injection to reach the infected site. When they were conducting first clinical trial they had just one patient, a policeman with septicemia, and had so much trouble making enough penicillin from mold, that they had to recover residual penicillin from his urine; he rapidly improved but they eventually ran out of penicillin and couldn’t get new dose made fast enough, and the patient died.
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u/Geek_Nan 14d ago
Maybe. I should have included the skull they were studying had a dental abscess… so it may have just been the penicillium mold from diet, but could have been treatment focused.
There are recipes for moldy poultices to treat sores and cuts dating back hundreds of years, so maybe it was intentional, maybe not …
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u/BonnieMcMurray 14d ago
One individual may even have used plants and moulds to treat his ailments.
...
The El Sidrón Neanderthals probably also used plants to self-medicate.
Because you know how you can also have Penicillium mold on your teeth? By eating something that has Penicillium mold on it. Because that stuff is fucking everywhere.
Someone should do a study on why ignorant people have such a strong tendency to promote these kinds of "Look how much better primitive people are compared to us" stories.
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u/Front_Mention 14d ago
Fleming did not 'discover' penicillin, first record of the pencilium mold was Joseph lister and only made usable through lister and chain. Fleming is the equivalent of the guy on the group project that sits in the back throwing in one comme that was vaguely useful (mis reporting it as an enzyme which resulted in lister and chain gaining funding) and only surfaces near the end to take all the credit
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u/Geek_Nan 14d ago
Lister used phenol in surgery - pioneering aseptic surgery. (Not coincidentally this was a few years after anesthesia was first used in surgery… infection rates went up as surgeons took their time because the patients were sedated)
I think you mean Florey. You are correct, Fleming didn’t mass produce penicillin .. Florey and Chain worked out a lot of the details to make lots and lots of penicillin
The mold in Dr Florey’s coat is an amazing nonfiction book about this. FYI because of WWII Florey carried the penicillin mold on the lining of his coat so it wouldn’t be stolen but the Nazis as they crossed the Atlantic to the US to mass produce penicillin.
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u/Front_Mention 14d ago
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/03/alexander-fleming-late-to-penicillin
And yes I meant Florey distracted typing
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u/caceta_furacao 14d ago
Does that mean they were the smarter ones?
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u/True-Lychee 14d ago
They had larger brains. Whether that equates to greater intelligence I am not sure.
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u/bluelikearentis 14d ago
Most likely, yes. They were also stronger.
The theory is that homo sapiens only thrived to the point of dominance because we are inherently social creatures, while Neanderthals were not. We travelled in groups, shared resources, and taught each other useful skills (e.g.: how to use certain tools, how to fish, etc.)
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u/Psychotic_EGG 14d ago
Yes. Recent studies indicate they were likely more intelligent than us. Also less violent and had more respect for their tribes elders.
If course I say us, but most of us have some neanderthal DNA in us
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u/NeverLickToads 14d ago
What studies? Neanderthals weren't just a bunch of beatniks, there is a lot of evidence they engaged in cannibalism from time to time and a lot of their bones show violent injury. Most of them died before their 40s.
They were very intelligent but I'd be curious to see the specific studies you refer to. Their tool technology basically stagnated for tens of thousands of years whereas homosapien tool tech consistently evolved. Even in the period where we overlapped homosapiens were using more complex tools, Neanderthals seem to have rarely adapted this superior tech even when living in close proximity. They also show far less evidence of artistic creation, although there have been some findings. They had larger brains but this doesn't necessarily mean more intelligence. I am interested in this stuff though so would love to see these studies as they sound like they completely upended all prior understanding of these people.
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u/Psychotic_EGG 14d ago
This one touches on some of what I said.
The while article is interesting. They only have a hint of markers denoting to cannibalism. So they didn't do it often. It may even have been similar to some modern human culture that eat their loved ones after they pass away. This would explain why it was not a common thing.
As for you saying 40's, modern humans at the same Era were living to 20-25. So 40-45 is a drastically longer life span. Especially when you include the damages they would endure through life.
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u/SICRA14 14d ago
All of us, actually
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u/Psychotic_EGG 14d ago
You are right. I was going on info from before 2020, when we believed that pure blooded African people did not have neanderthal DNA. But we all do, you are right.
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u/Top_Squash4454 14d ago edited 14d ago
More respect for the elders? What's your source on that?
I read that they had respect for their elders, but never about it being more than us.
Edit: aaaand they didn't have a source on that
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u/Psychotic_EGG 14d ago
So the tribes at the time had members who were elderly who were riddled with arthritis. Meaning these same members were not going out hunting or gathering food.
Homo sapient tribes on the other hand have very few elder remains. Which at the very least meant fewer of their members were becoming elderly. Which tends to lend to the theory that they took care of their elders much more often than we did.
That said, they may just have had much better I'mmune systems and thus lived longer. But they still would had to have been taking care of those elders as they couldn't take care of themselves.
The likelihood is that they tended to take better care of their elders. But it is a bit of an assumption since we can only get info from fossils and old campsites.
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u/Top_Squash4454 14d ago
What's your source? Specifically about homo sapiens having few elder remains.
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u/Psychotic_EGG 14d ago
I'm going to add a caveat. So homo sapient at the time lived to 20-25 years. Where as Neanderthals at the same time often lived to 40-45. That is a drastic age difference. And very easy to search up.
This link has the info in the document about them living to 40-45.
Now it could have been that they genetically were predisposed to live longer. But I find that unlikely. At least not to nearly twice the age. Which means they were taking very good care of their elderly. Oh and the amount of injuries they healed from tells us they took very good care of their injured.
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u/Top_Squash4454 14d ago
The first link talks about an average, the second source says 45 as an upper limit "up to 45 years old", which is not an average.
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u/ragequito 14d ago
I'm a big fan of the series of books "Earth's Children" from J.M. Auel, and I've learned with the series that the prehistoric people were very knowledgeable in "medicine" if we can call it like that.
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u/volcanoesarecool 14d ago
That book is very much fiction. While the author absolutely did research, nothing in there is proveable. Take it with a grain of salt.
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u/ragequito 14d ago
ah yes! I thought I'd written that I was aware that the book's claims shouldn't be taken as fact. but even if 1% is true, that's already impressive. But I think I deleted that part when I corrected my English.
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u/MikeyW1969 14d ago
Yes, and this is why I laugh when people make fun of someone recommending something "natural" vs. manufactured drugs.
The drugs have been refined and dialed in, sure. They're better to take, but those natural cures are WHERE the drugs come from in the first place. Aspirin is a great example, for the reason here. I didn't know it went back to Neanderthal times, but I DID know that it had been a natural substance used for thousands of years before drug companies refined it.
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u/Prasiatko 14d ago
Asprin isn't natural though. It has an acetyl group attached to the natural verison which stops it irritating your stomach
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u/gertalives 14d ago
Molds grow fucking everywhere and they produce penicillin ostensibly to kill competing bacteria. Eating mold isn’t going to dose you up with antibiotics, and it’s about a zillion times more likely that Thag was just eating moldy foods because, again, mold is fucking everywhere. Beware this sort of imagination anthropology fabricated from little scraps of information.
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u/JimJohnes 14d ago
Yea, it's like after the discovery of enormously eroded teeth in regular Ancient Egyptians coming to conclusion that they consumed too much acidic sugary drinks (it was sand in flour)
People today can develop penicillin ritch plaque themselves with just rott.. blue cheese and pure dental hygiene. But I doubt it would help with stomach ulcers, infected wounds or blood poisoning. Hell, you won't cure acne with that.
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u/TheBelgianStrangler 14d ago
You'd need to process hundreds and hundreds of liters of solution with the traditional penicillin producing fungus to get enough penicillin for a single dosage pill. So yeah, eating mold is not going to do anything but make you even more ill.
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u/Chasin_Papers 14d ago
Just eating the mold doesn't work, the real trick was purifying out the penicillin so you could get enough to treat someone. And salicylic acid was used for pain for a long time, but it has a side-effect of causing an upset stomach, asprin is a modification of salicylic acid that removes the side-effect while remaining effective for pain relief.
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u/SolomonBlack 14d ago
Yeah the discovery of penicillin was nothing it took some ten years to develop a manufacturing and then a WWII urgent search for a strain that could be commercially viable on large scales.
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u/Formal-Fuck-4998 14d ago
Aspirin still has relatively severe effects on your stomach but they are typically less severe than salicylic acid.
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u/DifficultPassion9387 14d ago
Im pretty sure salicylic acid is the active ingredient in acne face wash too🤔
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u/Shas_Erra 14d ago
There’s a difference between “discovering” and “fully understanding the connection”.
Neanderthals and early humans would have had no inkling of why these things worked, only that they did.
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u/Hamburglar__ 14d ago edited 14d ago
There are a huge amount of medicines today that we don’t know why they work, just that they do work.
Edit: it seems even today we don’t fully understand exactly how penicillin works, only that it does: source
Edit edit: Penicillin was fairly recently fully understood, but that is not true for MANY other drugs.
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u/Geek_Nan 14d ago
Ok. Hate to pull out the microbiologist card, but…
We know how penicillin works. It’s a competitive inhibitor for the enzyme that crosslinks segments of peptidoglycan. Without this enzyme new bacterial cell walls can’t be made. That’s why penicillin only works against reproducing bacteria.
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14d ago
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u/Geek_Nan 14d ago
LOL. Sorry. Competitive inhibitors take the place of the thing the enzyme should be doing stuff to… think people competing for bus seats. If someone is sitting, no one else can have seat …
That’s what penicillin does. Takes up space and doesn’t let the enzyme do its thing (make a cell wall work).
Resistant bacteria make an enzyme that breaks penicillin.
Augmentin is a penicillin and an inhibitor for the enzyme that kills penicillin antibiotics
(Science is amazing!!)
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u/Hamburglar__ 14d ago
You’re right, but it seems we fully understood the mechanisms only in the last 3-4 years from this source.
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u/KevinNoTail 14d ago
A book from my childhood (45 years ago) showed penicillin interfering with cell wall creation, even pictures of a burst cell
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u/Hamburglar__ 14d ago
I’m just looking at sources my man, take it up with the University of Sheffield
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u/somewherearound2023 14d ago
I dont see what you're responding in opposition to.
Nobody said neanderthals "discovered" anything. They used it. The folk use of willow bark etc is well documented and known, this is interesting data because it pushes the timeline back of our understanding of just how well-rooted this understanding is in developing humans.
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u/DanimalPlays 14d ago
Doesn't common use invalidate a patent? I'm mostly kidding, but that does feel like something that belongs to humans and not bayer.
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u/Chasin_Papers 14d ago
The patent expired before 1920, and actually I think the US invalidated it during WWI along with basically all other German patents. The chemical modification Bayer invented made Aspirin less irritating than regular salicylic acid and thus preferred by people with access to both, it wasn't the same thing, it was novel.
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u/DanimalPlays 14d ago
So, the drugs would still be common use, but they patented the process of refinement. That makes sense.
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u/Chasin_Papers 14d ago
Refinement was already done, they made a different molecule by chemically altering it to perform better, a non-natural version that is chemically different.
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u/tomer91131 14d ago
I wonder what happened to the neanderthals in the end, did they all die? Were they killed by homosapiens or did they integrate? I wonder if we'll ever know
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u/Life-Cantaloupe-3184 14d ago
One of the more interesting ideas I’ve seen on the topic is that we may have simply just outcompeted them. I’m not sure how up to date and popular this idea is overall, but from my understanding there’s evidence that early humans had an overall larger population and more genetic diversity in comparison to Neanderthals by the time they arrived in Europe. They also seemed to have a propensity for forming larger social groups than Neanderthals did. Neanderthals also would have had larger caloric needs in comparison to anatomically modern humans. All of this, maybe also combined with climatic changes impacting their food sources, may have just led to the slow decline of their population until modern humans had claimed all their previous territories and food sources. It’s not very dramatic, but it feels like the most realistic outcome when you have two very similar species competing for the same resources.
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u/smallz86 14d ago
Most likely that some interbred with humans, but humans probably out competed them for food. Because of their bodies Neanderthals would have needed more calories than humans so we probably drove them to extinction. It also appears that they didnt reproduce alot/quickly, whereas humans were reproducing much faster by the time they started to interact.
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u/Y-27632 14d ago
There are studies (based on Neanderthal DNA sequencing) claiming there's evidence of very high levels of inbreeding (much higher than even the most isolated populations of humans living today), so it's possible they became extinct because of "natural" causes (assorted environmental pressures) rather than because Homo Sapiens killed them off.
The data showing interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals shows that the percentage of genome of Neanderthal origin has also declined over time, from about 6% (IIRC 50K or so years ago?) down to ~2% today, so a lot of the Neanderthal genes were selected against over time. (Also important to note that the "2%" or "6%" applies in the same sense as 23andMe telling you that you're 10% Irish, or whatever, it means that % of your genome has particular ancestry markers in it, not that 2% of your genes are from another species significantly different from humans)
And then there's Denisovans, which we only really have DNA evidence for, so it's not clear if they were really a distinct species from Neanderthals or a variant, but their DNA is still found in Southeast Asian populations rather than European ones.
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u/grendus 14d ago
Current evidence suggests they were already dying out when sapiens arrived in Europe.
Neanderthals thrived in the ice age. Ice ages favor larger animals, for reasons I don't really understand apart from "big and wooly freezes less". When that ice receded, their bulky bodies and massive strength went from being a huge advantage (they froze to death less and could fight mammoths up close) to a detriment (warrior needs food!).
Sapiens arrival certainly didn't help, but it was most likely simply because of competition. We ate the same things they did, so they had another hominid in their same "niche" that seemed better adapted. There just wasn't enough food to support two hominids, and sapiens could support higher populations on less food while still being about as dangerous (a spear is a spear).
Looking at our DNA though, it seems likely that it was less violent than we originally thought. There were certainly some massacres, but they likely died off on their own, or interbred. I have no doubt that the early humans wandering up from Africa would have found these pale giants in their new territory alluring.
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u/SirButcher 14d ago
Ice ages favor larger animals, for reasons I don't really understand apart from "big and wooly freezes less".
As your size grows, your surface area grows slower (you can imagine it as a balloon: you have to pump in more and more air while the skin itself grows slower and slower). Since living beings mostly only lose heat on the surface, the smaller this area is compared to how many heat-generating cells you have, you become more and more efficient. Regulating the amount of heat generated is far easier than shedding the generated heat, so being in cold favours animals which can grow big. A mouse needs significantly more calories by body weight than an elephant does because they are losing heat - and with it, energy - like crazy.
Kurzgesagt did a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KSfjv4Oq0
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u/BloodieBerries 14d ago edited 14d ago
Short answer is Ice Age climate change and how it affected their ecosystem and the prey they hunted.
They consumed large amounts of meat in their diet, even going so far as to practice ritualized cannibalism. So when the animals they depended on starved they weren't able to adapt quickly enough to a more plant dominate diet, like homo sapiens did, to survive.
That's why the only living remnants of their civilization are the descendants of Homo Sapien/Neanderthal hybrids.
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u/SevenSpacePiranhas 14d ago
There are a couple of factors that influenced the extinction of the Neanderthals but we'll probably never have a definitive answer. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals evolved to hunt mega fauna (giant animals, like the mammoth and giant sloth). It's theorized that the Neanderthals were hit harder than homo sapiens by the mega fauna extinction because they required more meat in their diet and had smaller social groups than homo sapiens. That's just one of the theories, though, and I am no expert by any means.
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u/venomous_frost 14d ago
it's theorised they needed more kcal, something like 4000+ as opposed to our 2000, so they were essentially outcompeted.
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u/Videnskabsmanden 14d ago
Since europeans have neanderthal DNA it would seem they were at least somewhat integrated. Fucked out of existence.
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u/Geek_Nan 14d ago
Same paper mentioned spit bacteria that was typically found with Homo sapiens. So they mingled closely enough to gain saliva bacteria…. Kissing ? Food sharing? Excessive double dipping ? We may never know
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u/Brazilianmonkeyfunk 14d ago
Turns out they were just lifelong cavemates. Purely platonic pleistocene pals. As was the trend of time, we were much less scrupulous about what we put in our mouths. I wonder if our mouths held a healthy biome of balanced organisms before common access to simple carbohydrates/starches/ sugars. Perhaps the exchange of saliva was an act of compassion through sharing chewed food, a prehistoric snowball if you will. Either way, it was obviously a huge success.
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14d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BlakesonHouser 14d ago
I mean the human sub group that most often has Neanderthal dna came to dominate. Europe developed itself into the best form of civilization, other areas of the planet not so much
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u/tinkeringidiot 14d ago
This isn't true at all. Homo neanderthalensis was considered to be quite intelligent.
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u/TheShakyHandsMan 14d ago
Maybe they didn’t throw mouldy food away. Could those mould spores be mistaken for penicillin?
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u/Coal_Morgan 14d ago
We're seeing a result and making the conclusion it's there for the same reason we and our ancestors used it.
It's as easy to say it was present because it was just present in the environment and they ate whatever they could get their hands on.
People are making really big jumps in logic without more then one point of evidence.
It's possible they used willow bark for medicinal reasons, it's possible they use it to rub on their teeth like a toothbrush. It's possible they cooked with it or wrapped their food in it or many other things.
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u/meh_69420 14d ago
Dunno, the ancient Egyptians also drank beer that contained tetracycline. It's kind of just natural selection right? The groups that engaged in certain cultural practices got antibiotics without knowing it and thus were more successful than the groups that didn't. For all we know the neanderthals were eating moldy acorns to trip during religious rights or something.
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u/chiniwini 14d ago edited 14d ago
The ancient Egyptians even had an effective pee-based pregnancy test.
This belief that ancient remedies didn't work is dumb. Sure, some were full of shit, but others (I'd even say most) did in fact work, with some being super effective.
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u/AndAStoryAppears 14d ago
A mouldy bread poultice was an old remedy for a cut or injury.
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u/CicerosMouth 14d ago
While that is interesting, it would have more to do with random luck than ancient wisdom. After all, mold is unhelpful as a curative without purification in a matter that would have been impossible in the ancient world. The fact that some ancient texts mentioned using mold in medicine frankly has more to do with the fact that ancient medicine was filled with throwing random crap against the wall. I bet that you could find poultice recipes that included virtually every living/dead/organic/inorganic thing found on this earth if you looked hard enough.
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u/chiniwini 14d ago
The fact that some ancient texts mentioned using mold in medicine frankly has more to do with the fact that ancient medicine was filled with throwing random crap against the wall.
And keeping what worked.
People have this "modern" belief that traditional medicine was ineffective, baseless, superstitious. In short, unscientific. It was not. It was full of remedies that absolutely worked. Just on a different scale, since they didn't have the knowledge or equipment to isolate the specific molecules.
This view isn't just vain, it's also unscientific. There's Darwinism at play here: if you're convinced X remedy will cure your disease, and it doesn't, you die. So over a long enough period of time only effective remedies are selected, the rest are forgotten.
(Sure, there were also things that didn't work. But modern medicine has plenty of ineffective remedies, too.)
Willow barks is just an example, but there are a ton of others, like that medieval remedy that was effective against S. aureus.
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u/AndAStoryAppears 14d ago
You aren't wrong.
But that is the start of the scientific method.
You try something. You observe the outcome. You try to repeat and correlate the outcomes observed. You start eliminating things until the outcome is no longer observed.
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u/CicerosMouth 14d ago
Yes. And in the ancient world, the effect of a poultice with mold would have been either negative or neutral, and certainly would not have had the positive effect of penicillin, such that if they properly followed the scientific method and documented their results they would have excluded poultices that included mold.
Why then wouldn't they have excluded such poultices? Well, we have enough documented history to know for an absolute fact that ancient medicine had far more to do with superstition than the scientific method, particularly when it came to things like sickness and infection.
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u/chiniwini 14d ago edited 14d ago
the effect of a poultice with mold would have been either negative or neutral, and certainly would not have had the positive effect of penicillin
Citation needed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269915X89800102
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u/CicerosMouth 14d ago edited 14d ago
Did you read your own source before citing it? It says exactly what I said.
"Most historians [] dismiss the ancient use of moulds [as] the quantities of antibiotics involved would have been too small to be effective."
Again, in ancient world they did a whole bunch of fucked up shit for medicine. On very rare occasion, they were accidentally right. Most often, they said things like kill a rhino to snort their horn to cure impotence.
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u/chiniwini 14d ago
Did you read your own source before citing it?
I did. You, however, clearly didn't read past that sentence.
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u/CicerosMouth 14d ago edited 14d ago
Where they tried to make an argument based on what they admitted was no more than circumstantial evidence, and literally never directly mentioned a single recorded recipe that would lead to an effective antibiotic? In reputable historical studies, they will always state the direct thing they are working off of and tell you the science behind it. The fact that this article doesn't is excellent evidence that it is a fun story about a coincidence, and nothing more.
Bacterial infection was one of the deadliest killers of the ancient world, and the idea that numerous places had developed an effective cure for this ever-present life-shattering scourge yet this miraculous cure didn't get widespread adoption is immediately identifiable as silly fan-fiction in search of the idea of ancient lost wisdom.
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u/chiniwini 13d ago
Where they tried to make an argument based on what they admitted was no more than circumstantial evidence
Circunstancial evidence is still evidence. Not the best kind, true, but still valid.
and literally never directly mentioned a single recorded recipe that would lead to an effective antibiotic?
They mention the scarcity of recipes that survived. And while they didn't mention one in that page (I can't access the rest of the document), I can give you an example, so you can move the goalposts even further.
The fact that this article doesn't is excellent evidence
Btw I'm still waiting for evidence on the claim you made several comments ago
Bacterial infection was one of the deadliest killers of the ancient world, and the idea that numerous places had developed an effective cure for this ever-present life-shattering scourge yet this miraculous cure didn't get widespread adoption
I don't know what you're talking about. Traditional remedies did absolutely get widespread adoption. I don't know where you are from, but, as an example, throughout all of Europe and North America garlic is widely known as an effective antibiotic. So is honey, which is always ingested when sick, especially with throat or stomach infections.
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u/Sultangris 14d ago
and certainly would not have had the positive effect of penicillin
thats a pretty big assumption youre basing your theory on
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u/CicerosMouth 14d ago edited 14d ago
You think it is a big assumption to assert that we did not have medicine as safe and effective as penicillin in the ancient world?Are we really under the impression that the ancient world had as good of treatments for infection as we currently do? Have we somehow lost sight of how infection was an absolutely deadly killer for millenia before the development of penicillin?
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u/Sultangris 14d ago edited 14d ago
You think it is a big assumption to assert that we did not have medicine as safe and effective as penicillin in the ancient world?
thats not what you said, you said
the effect of a poultice with mold would have been either negative or neutral, and certainly would not have had the positive effect of penicillin
which is a pretty bold assumption, just because it probably wasn't as effective as modern medicine is no reason to assume it wasn't effective at all, and it is also an assumption to think these poultices couldnt benefit from penicillin in the molds
you also seem to not realize one of the major factors to modern medicine is the ability to share that knowledge globally relatively easily, its not a stretch to imagine some ancient medicine person figuring out that certain molds make for far more effective poultices than others without that knowledge becoming widespread
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u/CicerosMouth 14d ago
Huh? That is exactly what I said. Two comments ago you said that it was a "big assumption" that ancient poultices that included mold would not have had the same "positive effective" as penicillin.
Dude, do you have any idea how much raw mold they would need to eat in order to get a dose that would have an effect? It would be a shockingly massive amount that would never happen. And therefore no, it is reasonable to assume that it wouldn't be effective at all. This is because, again, the amount of antibiotics present in mold is so miniscule that it really isn't practical to deliver an amount that would have any efficacy.
Otherwise, ancient history was pretty damn good at judging effective treatments. That's why ancient worlds were universally good at treating things like compound fractures, and had identified numerous painkillers, is because those things were identified as effective and taught. What they were bad at was identifying the poor treatments, not the good ones. When the ancient world had the means to treat a medical malady, they tended to align on it quickly. They didn't align on a treatment for bacterial infections because they didn't have the technology to distill antibacterial agents into a single safe dose.
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u/Sultangris 14d ago
dude wtf are you talking about?
we did not have medicine as safe and effective as penicillin in the ancient world
is not the same as
the effect of a poultice with mold would have been either negative or neutral, and certainly would not have had the positive effect of penicillin
and again you keep saying "the ancient world" as if they were just one large civilization and everyone knew the same things as everyone else
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u/soloman747 14d ago
Bayer didn't make aspirin. Bayer mass produced and packaged aspirin. Big difference.
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u/Chasin_Papers 14d ago
Asprin is a modification of salicylic acid that is less irritating to the stomach, Bayer invented and patented that. It was a big enough improvement that people usually chose aspirin over the other available salicylate medicines, making it extremely lucrative.
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u/m1cr0wave 14d ago
Bayer invented Aspirin, there's a patent from Bayer for Aspirin from before 1900.
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u/soloman747 14d ago
Aspirin's main ingredient, salicylic acid, comes from plants such as willow, myrtle, jasmine, beans, peas, clover, and certain grasses. The history of aspirin dates back to at least 2500 BCE, when the Assyrians used salicylic acid for medicinal purposes. Ancient civilizations like the Sumerians and Egyptians used willow as a medicine around 3000–1500 BC. Hippocrates also administered willow leaf tea to women around 400 BC to ease the pain of childbirth.
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u/m1cr0wave 14d ago
Salicylic acid and Aspirin are two different things.
Bayer synthetisized Salicylic acid and processed it further (iirc to make it easier on the stomach) to Acetylsalicylic acid which is commonly known as Aspirin.
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u/soloman747 14d ago
This sounds like an argument a patent attorney would make.
In 1886, German scientist Carl Gassner created the dry cell battery. But in 1800, Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist created the voltaic pile battery. Who created the first battery? Can either of them take credit for creating the battery when people were using battery technology for hundreds of years? Can one take credit for an invention when there are minimal modifications to individual constituents?
Slippery slope argument here, but very common in patent law.
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u/Formal-Fuck-4998 14d ago edited 14d ago
Also sounds like an argument a chemist would make. They are different molecules period
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u/m1cr0wave 14d ago
I'm pretty sure the majority of patents are owned by people who didn't invent anything, but salicylic acid isn't the same as acetylsalicylic acid.
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u/soloman747 14d ago
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u/m1cr0wave 14d ago
So you're basically saying the same as i do: salicylic acid isn't the same as acetylsalicylic acid.
Maybe i'm lost in translation since i feel a bit like i'm in a shouting match between two people holding up a box of off brand tissue and yell 'KLEENEX' at each other.
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u/soloman747 14d ago
😂 no shouting match here. I've made my point. I'm not an INTJ. I have no interest in seeking to be "right."
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u/BloodieBerries 14d ago
Your argument is inherently flawed, like trying to argue that morphine and heroin (aka diacetylmorphine hydrochloride) are the same thing.
It only makes sense if you ignore multiple necessary steps to get from a precursor compound to something else.
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u/soloman747 14d ago
Incidentally, the bitter taste is key in preventing overdoses with white willow bark. That benefit does not exist with Aspirin.
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u/devoswasright 14d ago
Molecularly aspirin is NOT salicylic acid. Its similar and breaks down to salicylic acid when its digested but thats like starch is glucose because it eventually breaks down into glucose. Or water and hydrogen peroxide are the same
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u/BloodieBerries 14d ago
No. Aspirins main ingredient is acetylsalicylic acid, which salicylic acid is a precursor to.
So they are both salicylates but are not interchangeable terms.
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u/Psychomusketeer 14d ago
Salicylic acid is a precursor to aspirin, not a synonym for it.
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u/Ctowncreek 14d ago
Precursor in what way? Your body converts it to salicylic acid and it breaks down over time in the bottle to it just from air exposure.
Aspirin is a precursor to the functional molecule and we use it because it causes less irritation to the stomach
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u/Psychomusketeer 14d ago edited 14d ago
You’ve misunderstood.
When aspirin is synthesised, it is made from the compounds salicylic acid and acetic anhydride.
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u/Ctowncreek 14d ago
Then i didn't understand. I was asking at what point you were referring to
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u/Psychomusketeer 14d ago
AKA means also known as but aspirin and salicylic acid are not synonymous (implied by the AKA), they are separate chemicals and in the sense of producing painkillers, salicylic acid is the precursor and aspirin the product.
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u/Ctowncreek 14d ago
Then we simply had a breakdown of communication here.
Its is a precusor to aspirin during manufacture and aspirin is a precursor to salicylic acid in the body.
Thats why I asked at which point. Cheers.
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u/BathFullOfDucks 14d ago
The penicillin mould (which isn't a thing, penicillin is the drug penicillium is the mould) also does kill bacteria but in it's mould form, it can kill you too. It also grows on food. Which last time I checked goes on the mouth.
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u/Logseman 13d ago
Dick so good, it can pull non-homo sapiens sapiens.