Vessel residue taps into early brewing.Sit back, relax, and enjoy Old Sumerian, the beer that archaeologists dig. It undoubtedly tastes a bit flat - only a yellowish residue of the beverage remains inside an ancient storage vessel - but consider that this brew has aged for more than 5,000 years. "This is the earliest definite chemical evidence for beer drinking," asserts archaeological chemist Patrick E. McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania (body, education) University of Pennsylvania - The home of ENIAC and Machiavelli. http://upenn.edu/. Address: Philadelphia, PA, USA. in Philadelphia. McGovern, working with University of Pennsylvania chemist Rudolph H. Michel and archaeologist Virginia R. Badler of the University of Toronto Research at the University of Toronto has been responsible for the world's first electronic heart pacemaker, artificial larynx, single-lung transplant, nerve transplant, artificial pancreas, chemical laser, G-suit, the first practical electron microscope, the first cloning of T-cells, , studied the remains of a fragmentary piece of pottery from an Iranian site called Godin Tepe Godin Tepe is a prehistoric settlement in western Iran, situated in the valley of Kangavar. Discovered in 1961, the site was excavated from 1965 and during the 1970s by an American expedition headed by T. Cuyler Young Jr. and sponsored by the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Canada). . The artifact A distortion in an image or sound caused by a limitation or malfunction in the hardware or software. Artifacts may or may not be easily detectable. Under intense inspection, one might find artifacts all the time, but a few pixels out of balance or a few milliseconds of abnormal sound dates to between 3500 B.C. and 3100 B.C. An outpost of the Sumerians, who founded the world's first major civilization (SN: 3/3/90, p.136), Godin Tepe has also yielded the earliest chemical evidence of wine drinking (SN: 5/4/91, p.279). The Sumerians grew barley, from which beer can be made, and Sumerian writings indicate that beer served as their "preferred fermented beverage," McGovern says. Badler noticed that a crisscross pattern of long incisions sporting a pale, yellowish residue ran along the inside of the double-handled jar, which resides at the Royal Ontario Museum The Royal Ontario Museum, commonly known as the ROM (rhyming with Tom), is a major museum for world culture and natural history in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. in Toronto. This piqued her interest, since the Sumerian written sign for "beer" shows a jar bearing lines in the same pattern. Chemical analysis identified an oxalate oxalate /ox·a·late/ (ok´sah-lat) any salt of oxalic acid. ox·a·late n. A salt or ester of oxalic acid. salt - probably camcium oxalate - in the yellowish deposits, the scientists report in the Nov. 5 Nature. The brewing of beer from barley produces a sediment along the sides of fermentation and storage tanks that consists mainly of calcium oxalate Calcium oxalate is a chemical compound that forms needle-shaped crystals. Large quantities are found in the poisonous plant dumb cane. It is also found in rhubarb leaves, various species of Oxalis, and agaves, and (in lower amounts) in spinach. , they point out. Additional chemical tests on scrapings from the inside of an approximately 3,300-year-old Egyptian beer container and a modern brewer's vat yielded evidence of the same oxalate salt as that found in the Sumerian vessel, the researchers say. No evidence of a brewery or other vessels with oxalate residue has turned up at Godin Tepe, McGovern notes. Beer brewing probably originated in Mesopotamia, where Sumerian civilization arose, since barley was first cultivated there, he maintains. "We suspect even earlier chemical evidence for beer consumption exists," McGovern says. |
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