The Oldest Cheese in the World: in Xinjiang

choi

Kate Golembiewski, Like Your Cheese Well Aged? Have They Got a Treat for You. New York Times, Oct 1, 2024, at page D2.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/ ... kefir-xinjiang.html

Note:
(a) "Have They Got a Treat for You" is an emphatic form of "They Have Got a Treat for You," where "have" may be omitted to mean a past tense ("They got a treat for you" which can not have an emphatic form). Another common variation is "Have I Got a Treat for You."
(b) the article:
Liu Yichen et al, Bronze Age Cheese Reveals Human-Lactobacillus Interactions over Evolutionary History. Cell, 187: 1 (Oct 17, 2024).
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00899-7
(c)
(i) Xiaohe  新疆维吾尔自治区巴音郭楞蒙古自治州 若羌县 小河墓地 [This particular mummy was unearthed in 2003, and not the same as 楼兰美女 (which was unearthed in 1980).
(ii) Xiaohe Cemetery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaohe_Cemetery
(section 1 Archaeology, section 1.1 Discovery and early excavations: "A local hunter named Ördek found the site around 1910. Later, in 1934, with Ördek's help, Swedish explorer and archeologist Folke Bergman located the site [in 1934] which he named Xiaohe, 'little river,' after a nearby tributary of the Kaidu River" 开都河)

zh.wikipedia.org for "小河墓地" identified 开都河 as 孔雀河, which is the name of a section of 开都河. The same zh.wikipedia.org page also states, "2024年，考古学家在小河墓地发现了一块保存完好的起司残留物" which is the object of this scientific study reported here. However, the preceding quotation is false. See 胡珉琦, 古DNA揭秘3600年前 '小河公主' 享用的奶酪. 中国科学报, Sept 30, 2024
https://www.cas.cn/cm/202409/t20240930_5034424.shtml
("2003年，新疆小河墓地出土了一具约4000年前保存相当完整的女干尸，她因混血的美貌征服了考古学家，被称为 '小河公主。'   2010年后，考古学家在 '小河公主' 颈部和胸部发现了一些淡黄色块状物 * * * 块状物的乳清蛋白含量较低，以酪蛋白为主，证明是奶酪")
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Around 3,600 years ago, a young woman died and was buried in the Tarim Basin, a desert in what’s now the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. The dry conditions and her sealed coffin preserved her body, so when archaeologists uncovered her grave in 2003, they found her naturally mummified remains, still dressed in a felt hat, tasseled wool coat and fur-lined leather boots.

They also found chunks of cheese, laid out like a necklace.

This dairy decoration is the “oldest cheese in the world,” said Qiaomei Fu [付 巧妹], a paleogeneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences [中国科学院 古脊椎动物与古人类研究所]. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Cell, Dr. Fu led a genetic analysis of the dairy products and microbes present in cheese from the Tarim Basin, shedding light on how it was made.

Humanity’s love affair with cheese goes back millenniums. Scientists have found fatty residues on 7,000-year-old pottery that were most likely from cheese, and 4,000-year-old Sumerian texts mention the dairy product. But the Tarim Basin samples are the oldest substances in the world that scientists can confidently call cheese.

Dr. Fu and her team took samples of cheese scattered about the necks of three mummies from the Tarim Basin. They chemically isolated the fragments of DNA that remained and compared them with the genomes of modern species involved in the cheese-making process. They found traces of cow and goat DNA, indicating that the milk of both animals was used in the ancient cheese. They were also able to track down the DNA of microbes responsible for fermenting the milk into cheese.

The researchers found species of bacteria and yeast that, together with milk, coagulate into clumps called kefir grains, which are used to produce fermented, yogurt-like kefir milk and soft, sour kefir cheese.

For Dr. Fu, identifying the microbe species that produced the ancient cheese was “really, really exciting,” because cheese-making practices can hint at how people lived and whom they interacted with. The inclusion of the cheese in burials indicates that it was valued, and the multiple milk sources and the kind of bacteria used suggests potential interactions between people in the Tarim Basin, the Xiaohe, and peoples from the Eurasian steppe.

“It’s a new way of tracking what human cultures were doing long before or in the absence of language or written accounts,” said Paul Kindstedt, a cheese historian and professor emeritus of food science at the University of Vermont, who was not involved with the new study.

At the time the cheese was buried, it was most likely soft and tangy, not unlike modern kefir. To Dr. Fu’s knowledge, no one has tasted the crumbly bits that were pulled out of the tomb. “I think people don’t want to try it because we see that it’s not that attractive,” she said.

But if they did taste it, they might have been disappointed. Some archaeologists sampled cheese they found in an Egyptian tomb in the 1930s, and their paper from 1942 noted that it had “no smell and only a dusty taste.”

However, Dr. Fu and her colleagues are keen to try to recreate the cheese based upon the information they’ve gleaned about its production. “I think next step, we should make it,” she said.