Remains discovered with mummies in China prove to be oldest known samples of cheese.
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Clumps on the neck of this mummy from an ancient burial ground in the Chinese desert turned out to be ancient cheese, the oldest yet found .(Photo: Wang da Gang) |
Vintage Gouda may be aged for five years, some cheddar for a decade.
They're both under-ripe youngsters compared with yellowish clumps –
found on the necks and chests of Chinese mummies – now revealed to be
the world's oldest cheese.
The Chinese cheese dates back as early
as 1615 BC, making it by far the most ancient ever discovered. Thanks to
the quick decay of most dairy products, there isn't even a runner-up.
The world's best-aged cheese seems to be a lactose-free variety that was
quick and convenient to make and may have played a role in the spread
of herding and dairying across Asia.
"We not only identified the
product as the earliest known cheese, but we also have direct …
evidence of ancient technology," says study author Andrej Shevchenko, an
analytical chemist at Germany's Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell
Biology and Genetics. The method was "easy, cheap … It's a technology
for the common people."
The cheese, like the mummies, owes its existence to the extraordinary
conditions at Small River Cemetery Number 5, in northwestern China.
First documented by a Swedish archaeologist in the 1930s, it sits in the
fearsome Taklamakan Desert, one of the world's largest. A mysterious
Bronze Age people buried dozens of their own atop a large sand dune near
a now-dry river, interring their kin underneath what looks like large
wooden boats. The boats were wrapped so snugly with cowhide that it's as
if they'd been "vacuum-packed," Shevchenko says.
The combination
of dry desert air and salty soil prevented decay to an extraordinary
degree. The remains and grave goods were freeze-dried, preserving the
light-brown hair and strangely non-Asian facial features of the dead
along with their felt hats, wool capes and leather boots. Analysis of
the plant seeds and animal tissues in the tombs showed the burials date
to 1450 to 1650 BC.
Some of the bodies had oddly shaped crumbs on
their necks and chests. By analyzing the proteins and fats in these
clumps, Shevchenko and his colleagues determined that they're definitely
cheese, not butter or milk. It's not clear why people were buried with
bits of cheese on their bodies, Shevchenko says, though perhaps it was
food for the afterlife.
The analysis also showed the mummies'
cheese was made by combining milk with a "starter," a mix of bacteria
and yeast. This technique is still used today to make kefir, a sour,
slightly effervescent dairy beverage, and kefir cheese, similar to
cottage cheese.
If the people of the cemetery did indeed rely on a
kefir starter to make cheese, they were contradicting the conventional
wisdom. Most cheese today is made not with a kefir starter but with
rennet, a substance from the guts of a calf, lamb or kid that curdles
milk. Cheese was supposedly invented by accident when humans began
carrying milk in bags made of animal gut.
Making cheese with
rennet requires the killing of a young animal, Shevchenko points out,
and the kefir method does not. He argues that the ease and low cost of
the kefir method would have helped drive the spread of herding
throughout Asia from its origins in the Middle East. Even better, both
kefir and kefir cheese are low in lactose, making them edible for the
lactose-intolerant inhabitants of Asia. The new results are reported in
an upcoming issue of the
Journal of Archaeological Science.
Scientists
have found fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland that date
back more than 7,000 years, and there are Danish pots from 5,000 years
ago that hold what may be butter or cheese, says bioarchaeologist Oliver
Craig of the University of York in Britain. But he agrees that
Shevchenko's team has good evidence that their cheese is the
record-holder for age.
Craig is more cautious about the new
study's suggestion that the cheese was made with kefir starter rather
than rennet. That's harder to prove, he says, because the proteins could
have decayed too much to provide a definitive answer. He thinks a study
of animal bones or pottery is needed to confirm that the cheese at the
cemetery was part of a technological spread across Asia.
Whether
the cheese was common in its day, it's exceptional now. Usually if a
dairy product is left to its own devices, "bacteria will get in and
start to eat it away, liquefy it," Craig says. "It's just amazing it
survived."
Traci Watson / usatoday.com
Reference:
Yimin Yang, Anna Shevchenko, Andrea Knaust, Idelisi Abuduresule, Wenying Li, Xingjun Hu, Changsui Wang, Andrej Shevchenko,
Proteomics Evidence for Kefir Dairy in Early Bronze Age China, Journal of Archaeological Science, Available online 18 February 2014, ISSN 0305-4403,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.02.005
Actualización 03-03-14.
Hallado el queso más antiguo del mundo en China
Los responsables del descubrimiento calculan que podría tener unos 3.500 años de antigüedad
¿Se pueden imaginar cuánto tiene el
queso conservado más antiguo? Pues ni más ni menos que
3.500 años. Investigadores alemanes lo han hallado en los
sarcófagos de las
momias en una necrópolis en China.
La necrópolis fue hallada en el desierto chino de Taklamakán en 1930 y
durante varias décadas las momias estuvieron en un museo local, según
informa
USA Today.
Las momias fueron enterradas en una especie de barcas envueltas con
piel vacuna. Precisamente fue esta protección, combinada con el aire
seco y la tierra salada, lo que ha ayudado a conservar en un estado
óptimo los objetos depositados en las tumbas.
Los trocitos de
queso, ubicados sobre los pechos y los cuellos de las momias, datan del
año 1615 antes de nuestra era. El análisis realizado recientemente ha
confirmado que se trata precisamente de queso, no de leche o
mantequilla.
Los especialistas desconocen por qué las momias
fueron enterradas con este alimento, aunque probablemente se deba a una
tradición propia de muchas civilizaciones antiguas de colocar comida,
como pan y vino, en las tumbas de los fallecidos, para que
coman en la vida de ultratumba.
Aunque
el queso es un producto lácteo muy antiguo que se sabe que la humanidad
ya elaboraba en el sexto mileno antes de nuestra era, hasta el momento
no se habían encontrado sus restos, de ahí la importancia del
descubrimiento en China.
lavanguardia.com/