Madeleine Steinbach - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only
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.”
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
1 of 2 Next
