About 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, a paleogeneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In a study published in the journal Cell, 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 millennia. 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.
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 to 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 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 with whom they interacted. The inclusion of the cheese in burials indicates that it was valued, and the multiple milk sources and the kind of bacteria used suggest potential interactions between people in the Tarim Basin, the Xiaohe, and peoples from the Eurasian steppe.
At the time the cheese was buried, it was most likely soft and tangy, not unlike modern kefir. To 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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