Cacao beans appear to have been originally used more than 3,000 years ago by Central American Indians to make a beer-like brew, according to new discoveries by archeologists.

Archaeological excavations conducted near Puerto Escondido in Honduras between 1995 and 2000 uncovered pottery fragments dating from about 1100 B.C. to 800 B.C. and preserving within themselves an unexpected truth: cacao beans were used in Central America more than 3,000 years ago to brew a beer-like beverage.

Scientists wrote in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that traces of cacao were found on fragments of pottery vessels that show chocolate has been a part of people’s lives for even longer than previously thought – by some 500 years.

While the beer-like brew initially concocted from the cacao beans tasted nothing like the chocolate products we enjoy today, it appears that chocolate was actually discovered by accident, the researchers wrote, when Central American Indians decided to use cacao seeds as well, not just the cacao’s seedpods.

“It was beer with a high kick,” study author Rosemary Joyce, an anthropologist at University of California, Berkeley, said, as quoted by National Geographic. “But it would not have tasted anything like the chocolate we have today.”

National Geographic explains on its website that today's chocolate is made from the fermented seeds of the cacao tree, which grows exclusively near the Equator. These seeds were not appreciated for their rightful properties when the cacao plant appears to have been first used, around 1100 B.C.

It was some 300 years later that people kept the fermented seeds previously thrown away and used them to make a frothy but bitter non-alcoholic beverage that was only consumed on special occasions, such as marriages and births, study author John Henderson, an anthropologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said.

This ceremonial beverage found its way to Europe in the 16th century, through Spanish explorers. Today's familiar milk-chocolate bars first appeared in the United States in 1894, National Geographic notes.

The magazine also quotes Ann Krueger Spivack, co-author of “The Essence of Chocolate,” who said that discovering that fermented cacao seeds could be used to make a chocolate beverage was a “happy accident.” She was not involved in the study.

The first use of cacao may date further back by an additional couple of centuries, Henderson told Reuters in a telephone interview, adding that further tests of pottery found in Honduras will be tested for chemical proof.

Image credit: PNAS/National Academy of Sciences; pottery vessel from Honduras similar to the ones in which scientists found the earliest known evidence of the use of the cacao tree.