Thick pieces of cheese were found on a mummy that go back as far as 1615 B.C. Discovery News reported Thursday.
"Usually, proteins are either ignored or protein bulk content is estimated to characterize the nutritional properties," Anna Shevchenko, a protemics specialist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany told Discovery News. Recent DNA studies showed the population of these sites was mixed, European and Asian.
Archaeologists found the cheese while digging sometime from 2002 and 2004 at the Xiaohe cemetery which sits in Northwest China's Taklamakan desert Discovery News reported.
"According to common belief, they are difficult to recover from the sample matrix, totally degraded and samples heavily contaminated by environment, therefore the analyzed are hardly meaningful," Shevchenko told Discovery News.
"Our work opens new perspectives in the analysis of ancient material. But most importantly, it shows the technology behind ancient cheese-making," Shevchenko told Discovery News.
Scientists under the direction of Changsui Wang of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences gathered 13 samples of the food via 10 tombs and mummies such the body of one, 3,800 year-old covered in a shroud with a lengthy nose, and bright hair, Beauty of Xiaohe, Discovery News reported.
The cheese is made through kefir fermentation or a process where milk was mixed with chemical Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and many more. Yeast was also part of the equation. The milk's fat could also have been taken out while the kefir cheese was made, which is common in isolated areas throughout Eurasia, and Tibet Discovery News reported.
"It's the first direct evidence that milking spread to Eastern Eurasia," Wang told Discovery News.
"It's the earliest known dairy practice that persists until present times in an almost unchanged way. The discovery moves the mysterious history of kefir as far as to the second millennium B.C. making it the oldest known dairy fermentation method," Yimin Yang, an archaeologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, told Discovery News.
