14 DAY TRIAL // Archaeologists who were analyzing an ancient tomb in the Taklamakan Desert in China found yellow lumps, believed to be the world's oldest cheese, on mummies buried around 3,600 years ago. The cheese was attached to the necks and chests of perfectly preserved mummies.
The mummies were discovered in 1934 by Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman at a burial site known as the Small River Cemetery No. 5. Among them, there was a female mummy known as the Beauty of Xiaohe.
The cheese was found during archaeological excavations conducted between 2002 and 2004 at the Xiaohe Tomb, and dates back to 1,615BC, which makes it the oldest cheese ever discovered.
It seems that the multiple layers of leather that covered the mummies' bodies, and the dry, salty sand of the desert helped preserve the cheese. The mummies were buried in sand dunes near a river under large wooden boats, and the bodies were wrapped so tightly in cowhide that they were practically vacuum-packed.
However, scientists have only now analyzed thoroughly the yellow crumbs measuring 0.4 to 0.8 inches (10.16 to 20.32 cm) in diameter. Experts from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences collected 13 samples of the yellow stuff from 10 tombs, and some German researchers performed a protein analysis and discovered they were actually a cheese made from kefir fermentation.
“It's the earliest known dairy practice that persists until present times in an almost unchanged way. The discovery moves the mysterious history of kefir as far as to the second millennium BC, making it the oldest known dairy fermentation method,” archaeologist Yimin Yang said, according to the Mirror.
Scientists say the cheese isn't remarkable just for its age, as the discovery also reveals valuable information about the ancient cheese-making technologies. Their analysis showed that the cheese had been made using a mix of bacteria and yeast, creating a type of lactose-free variety of cheese, similar to today's cottage cheese.
“We not only identified the product as the earliest known cheese, but we also have direct evidence of ancient technology,” said analytical chemist Andrej Shevchenko of Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany, cited by Daily Mail.
The expert thinks this method of creating vegetarian kefir proved easier and cheaper for people at the time, and that it might have been responsible for spreading the practice of dairy farming across Asia during the Bronze Age.
Researchers had previously discovered fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland that are more than 7,000 years old and some Danish pots used for making cheese from 5,000 years ago, but they say the cheese found in China’s Taklamakan Desert is probably the oldest to be recovered.