The oldest known piece of cheese has been discovered, draped across the neck of a mummified woman.
During a 2003 excavation at the Xiaohe Cemetery in Xinjiang, China, archaeologists opened a 3,600-year-old coffin and found a substance placed around the neck of the mummy.
Initially, archaeologists believed the object was a necklace, but upon closer inspection, they identified it as the world’s oldest cheese.
Qiaomei Fu, a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told NBC News, “Regular cheese is soft. This isn’t. It’s now extremely dry, dense, and has turned to hard dust.”
She noted that the arid climate of the Tarim Basin desert played a key role in preserving the mummy and the cheese.
The findings shed light on how Bronze Age people consumed dairy and how fermented foods spread throughout Asia. The cheese was identified as kefir, made by fermenting milk with kefir grains, with evidence suggesting both goat and cow milk were used in its production.
#MaltaDaily