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Ecuadorian scientists have revived a new species of yeast from pre-Incan tomb, illuminating prehistoric life
February 19, 2012 | 14
Tombs where chicha fermentation vessels were found are buried beneath Quito's Florida neighborhood, overlooking Mariscal Sucre International Airport....[More]
Each tomb is about 16 meters deep, dug into volcanic rock. Single, double, triple (pictured) and quadruple shafts have been found.
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The bodies were placed in fetal positions against the walls of the tombs signifying the return to "Mother Earth." About 20 bodies were found in each shaft....[More]
Several kinds of pottery are found in the tombs. The largest pots are chicha fermentation vessels. The smaller pots contained corn, potatoes or beans.
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Three-legged pots were used for cooking food, placed directly in a fire pit. A corn mush is cooked in the early steps of making chicha.
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Javier Carvajal Barriga, a biologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito, holds a frozen vile of the new species of yeast, Candida thea , that he collected from the ancient fermentation vessels and revived....[More]
Manager of the Mama Clorinda Ecuadorian Food Restaurant in Quito, Roberto Guomo holds a jug of chicha, a fermented corn drink made daily in the restaurant.
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A glass of chicha, made of corn and spices, along with rotten pineapple rind added to start fermentation.
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Mama Cloinda chef Nelson Cardenas, who makes the chicha daily, shares his recipe for the intoxicating beverage.
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The Indians initiated fermentation of chicha using saliva and human feces. Candida yeast from saliva and human stools initiated fermentation but were inhibited from growing when the alcohol level reached 4 percent....[More]
Carvajal takes a series of scrapings one to five millimeters deep from inside an ancient fermentation vessel under sterile conditions to obtain the ancient yeasts that are trapped in the pottery's pores....[More]
Carvajal has revived ancient yeast from several other sources. Here he is shown pouring a glass of beer that he made from yeast he collected and revived from the fermentation vessel used to make the first beer in America in 1534 by the Franciscan monk Fray Jodoco Ricke....[More]
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14 Comments
Add CommentThe slide with the very short mummies is confounding without an explanation - what is that a picture of? It's not them, is it full scale, PC generated; what? By itself, it is macabre.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI object to the word "new" to qualify this "discovery"; the writer states, "he coaxed a community of yeasts, which had lain dormant in the entombed vessels since A.D. 680, back to life." By definition, new is never-before. Coaxed BACK to life; they're old, not new. It's not a discovery, it's a stumble into the past, serendipity. You cannot bring something back to life and call it new! "Look, here for the second time - I mean first time, this new, recently dead thing."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bones from this tomb have been removed to a museum for study and replaced with manikins to show how the bodies were found in the fetal position. Many other tombs here are still undergoing excavation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC. thea is a new species based on genetic sequencing and molecular biological analysis and it is recorded as such in the paper published this week in the scientific journal cited in the article. This is not the first time a new species thought to be extinct has subsequently been found alive. The coelacanth (an ancient lobe fin fish) is a famous example of this. The yeast does not form spores. It was not viable without the specialized process Dr. Carvajal has devised to revive ancient yeast. The process involves rehydrating the cells,repairing the damaged cell membrane, and restarting their metabolism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDarwinian/Mendelian evolution includes microbes, the dominant form of life on Earth. This is not a new species of Candida but a phase in the evolution of the Candida microbial breed that we have identified in modern times to date. Some phases in microbial evolution have become extinct, as we well know happened with primate fossils, such as Lucy. Anti-microbial pharmaceuticals have speeded up microbial evolution, so that many microbes can now defend themselves against what we see, with our limited knowledge, as old-line antibiotics, for example, that really haven't been around that long. Some modern microbes have learned to thicken their cell wall when attacked and/or to bombard the antibiotic molecule with an enzyme that snips off its tail, crippling it. Giving rise to an ID wisecrack that some bugs today are smarter than the drugs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSign me up for a growler! Hold the human feces though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs stated in the article, the bodies were found in the fetal position, which is why they appear "short". What was not stated, but was probably true, is that the bodies were dessicated (and then wrapped) before interment, which is why the bodies appear to be less bulky than you would expect from being in the fetal position.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs someone else has so verbosely pointed out, "new" has multiple meanings, and in this context means "previously unknown or undecribed by science". The headline is perfectly accurate, if easily misconstrued by the scientifically illiterate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisR. Douglas Fields, very impressive report about some very impressive work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to me, unhygienic eating habits alone with near starvation, from time to time, are the circumstances that give us alcoholic beverages! No doubt such was discovered and rediscovered in many places over many spans of time.
Richard Carlson
They started their fermented drinks using feces and diseased phlegm? I'm not mourning the demise of this particular "culture".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile the word "new" can obviously have "relative" meanings, perhaps what's even worse than any so-called "scientific illiteracy", is the sense of grandiosity and "entitlement" that it must take to so casually resort to rudeness & name-calling over a disagreement. Although I think the, um, "scientific" term for that is clinical Narcissism! ;-p
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe method used to initiate fermentation is fascinating, but of course these people had no idea about germs--or the mechanism of fermentation for that matter. In fact German biologist Theodore Schwann was ridiculed by leading authorities when he first proposed the idea that fermentation was the result of microbes consuming sugar and excreting alcohol and carbon dioxide in 1839. (Schwann's scientific career was ended after only 5 years.) These ancient people were simply following ritualistic practices that had been found to work through trial and error.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMing..., I intended no rudeness nor name-calling. I consider it a fact that the scientifically literate would have no problem understanding what was meant by the term "new" in the context in which it was used. I'm sorry that I couldn't find a more polite term in which to couch my comment. You, on the other hand, were deliberately rude and resorted to name-calling. You read way too much into a simple statement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Ipias from Quito were a human cultural group whose believes were too much different to those of the Occidental Culture. When they died, they returned to mother earth, they didn`t go to heaven. In that context, they made deep tombs to facilitate the dead`s last trip to their original homeland. If we think on the introspective character of this believes (i.e. coming back to the bowels of the earth)it is not surprising that live in the form of food (i.e. chicha) came from their oun bowels, that is, from their feaces. On the other hand, the aparent absence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the fermentations systems in America (unpublished studies of fermented beverages from ancient indian cultures of America) can probably point out to an ecological characteristic very much different to that of the European, where wine and beer were produced thousands of years before, using the abovementioned species. Moreover, if we think on the tradicional, old fashioned way of making wine, we have to remind that grape juice was obtained after steping with naked feet on the grapes. I need to remark that Candida yeast species are also found as inhabitants in feet, in some cases causing athlete`s foot disease.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the pejorative comment about the culture that some reader posted, I would ask for the wide and profound criteria about the costumes of our and his ancestors.