Egyptian Mummies, Connection to the Americas, cocaine and tobacco

Sorry if this has been addressed before.

I study neuropharmacology.
In our last class, the professor mentioned that many Egyptian mummies were tested to see what chemicals the egyptians used to preserve the bodies.

Most of the mummies tested positive for nicotine and coc aine. This alone shouldn't be surprising since the properties of each can be bacteriostatic. The question is how did they get the compound? Cocaine can only be made from the cocoa plant found in the americas. Nicotine can be found in many different plants, but the concentration found in the mummies, (3x the ammount concidered to be lethal to humans) is believed to only be found in tobacco. Similarly, this is also found in the americas (or at least we thought it was - perhaps there was an ancient strain that is now extinct without trace)

So I did a google search of the topic. Apparently Discovery ran a show on it in 1997. A bunch of other links are found at
this page Has anyone else heard much about this?

Here are some sites that give more detail on the ancient sea journeys.

www.barca.fsnet.co.uk...


www.wfu.edu...


www.druglibrary.org...


[edit on 03 22 2005 by BlackGuardXIII]

On this subject there are a bunch of threads, you might like to do an ATS search for them to get more information too.

From what I recall, there are actually a heckuva lot of remians from the old world that test positive for nicotine or tobacoo. The long and short of it is that its suspected that there was a nicotine bearing relative of tobaco in the old world (there are non-nicotine bearing relatives currently) that went extinct by the modern era. There are also coca related plants, but they too have no coc aine in them, so its also supected that they too existed but went extinct.