I thought I was a big cheese lover, but even I hadn't considered being mummified and buried with a block of it.
This lady in China more than three millennia ago must have been the biggest cheesehead of all time.
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.
World's oldest cheese! What an accomplishment!
'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.
(No, the cheese is not still edible.)
A DNA analysis of the cheese samples, she told NBC News in a phone interview Thursday, tells the story of how the Xiaohe people — from what's now known as Xinjiang — lived and the mammals they interacted with. It also shows how animal husbandry evolved throughout East Asia.
This mummy was excavated in 2003 and the researchers always thought this was a bit of jewelry. Only recently did they discover it was cheese.
They identified the cheese as kefir cheese, which is made by fermenting milk using kefir grains. Fu said they also found evidence of goat and cow milk being used.
The journey of the cheese took them to tracing the journey of the kefir culture, which is used to make the final cheese.
The study also shows how Xiaohe people, who were known to be genetically lactose intolerant, consumed dairy before the era of pasteurization and refrigeration, as cheese production lowers lactose content.
The research into the cheese also helped scientists to study the development of bacteria over the last few thousand years.
It's amazing how much knowledge can be gained from a small cube of cheese.
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