The World’s Oldest Cheese Was Found Smeared On The Heads And Necks Of 3,600-Year-Old Mummies In China
In China, a strange white substance was found on the heads and necks of several 3,600-year-old mummies. When researchers tested the substance, they realized it was the world’s oldest cheese.
Initially, the material was discovered about two decades ago on mummies at the Xiaohe Cemetery located in the Tarim Basin of northwestern China.
Now, DNA tests have revealed that it was kefir cheese, a probiotic soft cheese that is still eaten today. It was made with cow and goat cheese thousands of years ago.
In the 1990s, hundreds of mummified individuals were found at the Xiaohe Cemetery in the Tarim Basin, an arid desert area in the Xinjiang region. The dry desert air helped preserve the mummies, so their facial features and hair color have remained clearly visible.
The Tarim Basin mummies were buried with felted and woven clothing in boat graves. They belonged to a genetically isolated group but were open to new ideas and technologies.
The new research suggested that the Xiaohe people did not mix different types of animal milk when making kefir. This practice was also common in traditional Greek and Middle Eastern cheesemaking.
The Xiaohe people likely created cheese by using previously made kefir grains that were passed down through family and friends—the same way that traditional producers make kefir cheese nowadays.
The research team identified three cheese samples from the burials that contained a number of fungal and bacterial species, including Pichia kudriavzevii and Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens. Both are found in modern kefir grains. These grains consist of bacteria and yeast, which ferment milk into cheese.
“This is the oldest known cheese sample ever discovered in the world,” said Qiaomei Fu, the senior author of the study and a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “Food items like cheese are extremely difficult to preserve over thousands of years, making this a rare and valuable opportunity.”
Madeleine Steinbach – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
The L. kefiranofaciens grains were also closely related to similar grains originating from Tibet, challenging a long-held belief that kefir first came from the Caucasus Mountains region.
The researchers were able to evaluate the evolution of probiotic bacteria over the past 3,600 years by sequencing the bacterial genes.
“Our observation suggests kefir culture has been maintained in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region since the Bronze Age,” Fu said.
“[We can] observe how a bacterium evolved over the past 3,000 years. Moreover, by examining dairy products, we’ve gained a clearer picture of ancient human life and their interactions with the world.”
It is still unclear why the mummies had cheese smeared on them in the first place, but the discovery gave us a glimpse into ancient cheesemaking, which serves as the foundation of the human diet and lifestyle today.
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