World's oldest cheese found on ancient Chinese mummies
The kefir cheese “has now become really dry, dense and hard dust,” the co-author of a study published this week told NBC News.
When the 3,600-year-old coffin of a young woman was excavated in northwestern China two decades ago, archeologists discovered a mysterious substance laid out along her neck like a piece of jewelry.
It was made of cheese, and scientists now say it’s the oldest cheese ever found.
“Regular cheese is soft. This is not. It has now become really dry, dense and hard dust,” said Fu Qiaomei, a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the co-author of a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell.
…
While previous research has suggested kefir spread from the northern Caucasus in modern Russia to Europe and beyond, the study shows the spread also took another route toward inland Asia: from present-day Xinjiang via Tibet, giving crucial evidence of how the Bronze Age populations interacted.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/worlds-oldest-cheese-found-ancient-chinese-mummies-rcna172805Open linkView original on lemmy.world
"Chinese" mummies is a bit misleading. The Tarim Basin has a long history of Chinese rule/influence, but not that far back.
These mummies are from a unique population that descended largely from Ancient North Eurasians, a group who contributed smaller percentages of ancestry to Northern Chinese people, Europeans, Siberians and Native Americans.
So these cheese enthusiasts are less Chinese and more like distant foreign relatives to the Chinese who adopted dairy-heavy pastoralism after it expanded through the steppe.
"I was going to eat that mummy" - Professor Farnsworth
That joke became even funnier when I found out about British people cannibalizing mummies because they're weird freaks.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/eating-mummies-as-medicine
Haha! Never heard of that before. Thanks for sharing. Definitely brings that joke into a new light. :)
Mummies were also made into paint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
Also found nearby...
She had a cheese necklace as funerary attire? I want to join whatever culture did that.
The irony that East Asia now invented cheese, a thing they don't traditionally eat this historical side of the Han empire.
Maybe it was milk when they buried it
I knew someone would eventually get it
A necklace of stationary liquid milk would be interesting for a whole other set of reasons.
I want to be buried with cheese too.
There's no point. You can't take cheese with you to the afterlife. Anubis doesn't allow it.
I think if enough people did it, Anubis would grow to like cheese.
He does have a jackal head... dogs do like cheese...
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