Cheese older than Jesus Christ discovered in China

For something as universally known and loved as cheese, it’s interesting to note that the roots of the art of cheese-making remain a great mystery.

 

Fragments of pottery believed to be primitive cheese-strainers have been found in Poland, dating back as far as 6,000 BCE. Other pieces of evidence, such as 5,000-year-old Danish pots that may have served as butter or cheese containers, have also been unearthed over the decades.

 

However, actual preserved samples of these ancient cheeses are few and far between, and most of what we know about the origins of cheese—a product of human ingenuity that seems to predate recorded history—is based on circumstantial evidence and intelligent guesses.

 

This is why the recent discovery of what appears to be the world’s oldest cheese, in the form of yellowish clumps buried with mummies found in China, is a remarkable (and rather surprising) find.

 

 

Buried underneath the sands of the Taklamakan desert in Northwestern China, the cheese had been there as early as 1450 to 1650 BCE. The cheese was discovered under the Xiaohe Cemetery during an excavation between 2002 and 2004. Researchers believe that the cheesy pieces were intended to serve as the mummies’ snacks during their journey to the afterlife.

 

The clumps of cheese were between 0.4 inch and 0.8 inch in size, and were as well-preserved as the Eurasian-looking mummies they were buried with. The dry air and salty soil abundant in the area made it possible for the bodies (and the cheese) to stay well-preserved for so long.

 

Cheese whizzes

 

Andrej Shevchenko, study author and analytical chemist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany, stated that his team’s expedition not only yielded the world’s oldest cheese, but also “evidence of ancient technology” – “technology for the common people” that made the process of making cheese simple and efficient.

 

The cheese was made by combining milk and a “starter” mix of bacteria and yeast. According to the team, the clumps were fermented using agents such as Lactobacillus and Saccharomycetaceae instead of rennet (a substance extracted from the stomachs of young mammals, commonly employed in the creation of cheddar and other hard cheeses). This is essentially the same technique used to make kefir, a sour dairy beverage, as well as its cheese variant.

 

The team was also able to determine that the ancient cheese was lactose-free, making it easy to digest for the lactose-intolerant citizens of early Asia. Additionally, the clumps had a level of salt content below the standard for brined cheeses, meaning that the clumps were indeed intended for quick consumption.

 

As Shevchenko and his team pointed out, the kefir method is efficient and does not involve killing any animals, which may have helped promote the spread of the practice of herding from the Middle East to parts of Asia.

 

"The evidence of kefir dairy that occurred already at the Early Bronze Age helps [us] to understand why milking was spreading over Eastern Eurasia despite the lactose intolerance of the local population," wrote the researchers in their paper, which was published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science. — TJD, GMA News