The oldest cheese in the world (that we know of)

At a burial ground in northwest China, mummies – and their cheese adornments – tell all.

A study published in the scientific journal Cell last fall reported Chinese Academy of Sciences geneticist Qiaomei Fu and her team of researchers have sequenced bacterial DNA from chunks of ancient cheese.

How ancient, you ask? Try upwards of 3,000 years.

It all started at the dawn of time, when — wait, let’s fast forward: It all started in the early 2000s, when a group of scientists from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Xinjiang, China discovered ancient mummies in a cemetery belonging to the Bronze Age Xiaohe population — a people whose genetic analysis shows origins in East Asia and West Eurasia.

The site is the largest of such in the world to date, with 330 tombs. Upon excavation, the archeologists found a peculiar white substance scattered around the heads and necks of some of the mummies. They determined it to be a kind of fermented cheese and sought to extract and analyze its DNA. Now, almost 20 years later and the initial survey of the cheese complete, the team’s groundbreaking research is at our fingertips.

“Due to the abundance of proteins from ruminant milk, lactic acid bacteria, and yeast in the samples, these dairy remains have been identified as kefir cheese,” the study reads.

Kefir is “a traditional beverage produced by fermenting milk using kefir grains.” Kefir cheese is drained kefir milk.

The research suggests that this Bronze Age kefir cheese was made using both cow and goat milk. However, “the bovine and caprine milk seem to have been used in different batches rather than mixed like the mixed milk that is frequently used in Greek and Middle Eastern cheeses.”

Fu and her team go on: “The history of fermented dairy is largely lost…as both artifacts and molecular evidence of ancient, fermented dairy are extremely scarce. Little is known [in particular] about the origin of the techniques and the history of [animal husbandry and dairying] in East Asia. With the great privilege of accessing several Bronze Age cheese samples from the Xiaohe cemetery, we were able to interrogate the DNA information of a [lactic acid bacteria] species that was regularly propagated and consumed by humans over thousands of years.”

A complex read for the non-scientist, Fu and her team’s report ultimately lay claim to one thing: that of tying a fermented food known to us as kefir to a kefir-sister cheese made by a civilization from almost 3,500 years ago. (The Xiahoe laid it to rest with their mummified departed, no less!) How much more of a history with humanity can dairy hope to have?

Read the full study here.