When archaeologists discovered mysterious white granules smeared on the heads of Bronze Age mummies and on the jewelry they wore, they suspected it was some kind of fermented milk product. But they didn’t have the technology to tell exactly what it was.
Ten years later, in 2014, protein analysis advanced to the point where it was possible to confirm that the granules found on mummies in Xinjiang, China, were a type of kefir cheese, making this sample the oldest known intact cheese in the world.
Another decade later, genetic analysis showed how it was done.
It turns out that the more than 3,500-year-old recipe is remarkably similar in some ways, and radically different in others, to the methods used today.
The similarities are striking: two cheese samples were made from cow’s milk; a third of goat’s milk. They remain among the most popular options today.
Even the species of bacteria and fungi used to ferment milk are known: Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii are still used to prepare the fermented milk drink kefir.
“Prehistoric cheese probably had a mild, yeasty, boozy flavor due to the alcoholic fermentation involved in making kefir,” says cheese historian Paul Kindstedt, professor emeritus of food science at the University of Vermont and author of Cheese and Culture: A History Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization (2012).
The differences also tell an interesting story.
A cheese found in Xinjiang is helping researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing study how L kefiranofaciens bacteria have evolved and adapted to the human gut over millennia, combining with other strains to become more stable and, importantly, less likely to trigger an immune response in the human gut. .
It’s not surprising that the pellets ended up smeared on the mummies, Kindstedt notes, given how integral milk, cheese and ghee were to spiritual rites in ancient cultures.
Documentary evidence of such rites dates back to at least the 7th century BC.
The finds in Xinjiang provide new evidence of this cultural and spiritual legacy, Kindstedt says. In many ways, “this cheese is a smoking gun” for what happened in the world of prehistoric people, he adds.
After all, dairy has changed the game. For millions of years, adults have been largely lactose intolerant. Sour milk products were the only way to absorb the vital nutrients of milk. Such fermentation also extended the shelf life of perishable foods, making them easier to store and transport.
The ability to make cheese would improve nutrition and change life expectancy; it would make migrations more sustainable.
In fact, there is evidence of widespread cheese production for 7,000 years. Most of the earliest evidence comes from tooth fragments and pottery shards.
In 2018, an international team of researchers found traces of milk fat on pottery shards in Croatia that were at least 7,000 years old. It is believed that the broken clay kitchen utensil was once a sieve used to strain cheese from whey…to make curds, thus much older than the idea of a house itself.
