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Fascinating, but not really surprising. Some dates we have set for the advent of a given technology represent the challenges of archaeology rather than what is believed to really be the start of something. Making some form of fermented grain/fruit, fermenting dairy, baking bread all are just too easy to stumble on and represent too much of an advantage to age been anything like as recent as we’ve often thought them to be. It’s still more than just cool when a date gets set back by five thousand years though!
I wonder if this is something that has been a continuous feature of human existence for all of this time, or if different groups rediscovered the tech over and over? If you’re getting dairy, then you’re going to rapidly realize how useful a cow’s stomach is to hold milk. If you engage in any level,or animal husbandry you’ll end up with dead calves, and if you put milk in one of their stomachs... boom... the tech is revealed.
Four thousand.
What’s even more interesting is the hypothesis that fermented milk products like yoghurt and cheese made it possible to: 1, farm further north as it provided a way to store energy for later consumption and 2, non-human milk also allowed women to ween children earlier which in turn made it possible to reduce the reproduction cycle and grow the pop. faster, which given disease back then, meant they could successfully colonize new lands.
Cheese making most likely predates milk consumption. Don't forget that digesting lactose is a relatively new mutation, and not even universal today.
Not sure though - how could you discover cheese if you were not actively storing and processing milk in the first place? I think they are closely intertwined.
Lactose intolerance is something that develops as you age, but being able to digest lactose is a critical ability for childhood survival. Dairy is perfectly fine for children, even for most of the children who will develop lactose intolerance later in life.
> Lactose intolerance is something that develops as you age
Not necessarily. There are many kids these days that are diagnosed as lactose intolerant because we know about it:
I wonder if there's any salvageable yeast DNA on the pots. Would love to see some ancient strains!
It's a neat idea, but I don't know if it would actually work.
Cheese is fermented by lactic acid bacteria, not yeast. From my limited knowledge of lactic acid fermentation, there really isn't the same diversity of starters as there is in yeast fermentation. At least, I've never heard of people cultivating or buying particular strains of lactobacillus in the same way beer brewers select particular strains of yeast.
I have, apparently people throw cheese on the walls of new dairies to get the right strains around.
That seems improbable. Doesn't the strain of bacteria used determine what kind of cheese comes out the other end of the process?
That, and what fungus, if any grows on/in the cheese
I was under the impression this cheese was more like Kefir -- a symbiotic yeast/bacteria culture
The vessels are gorgeous.
i recently stumbled upon cheese-making by accident. and it turns out it's trivially easy. and with raw milk, it probably wasn't just easy but almost unavoidable once you were milking cows
cheese making has 3 stages. milk is curdled, then strained, then pressed, and then optionally aged (i haven't tried aging yet)
raw milk curdles itself and the whey could be strained out as easily as pouring it on a bed of grass or leaves and pressed by hand or with the weight of a stone in that same bed of grass. the result is cheese
i can't buy raw milk, so my process is a bit different. i make yogurt, strain with a piece of fabric, and then press with a potato ricer
making yogurt with pasteurized skim (or near skim, or non-homogenized) is trivially easy once the bacteria exists - inoculate with a starter (which can be as easy as adding milk to a "dirty" vessel) and let it sit till it curdles. for my first batch i used stonyfield to inoculate, and have used my own yogurt (or whey) as the starter since then. heat the mixture to 110°F and let it sit for several hours. there are also strains that work at room temp (but i haven't tried them). the result isn't as thick as commercial yogurt, but it's easier to strain. homogenized milk with fat doesn't produce a strong enough curd to strain, but that's a modern problem
After sitting for 7K years in a pot milk residue can hardly expected to be fresh though.
How do they know the fermentation was deliberate?
(not that fermentation wouldn't have been discovered anyway a few days after the first person put milk in a vessel).
"Deliberate" is a matter of definition. But they mention gratings that would be used in production, although I don't see it in the pictures.
and bless-ed were they
Whilst this is a very interesting read, I'm not sure that the statement that "this pushes back cheese-making by 4,000 years" is correct.
https://www.nature.com/news/art-of-cheese-making-is-7-500-ye...
This nature article from 2012 makes an almost identical claim.