World's oldest piece of cheese found on Chinese mummy

Researchers say they have found the world’s oldest cheese inside a Chinse tomb dating back 3,600 years.

Mummified remains can tell us a lot about the way civilisations once lived, like the discovery of cocaine found in mummified brains that completely altered our understanding of drug history in Europe.

Now, in China, what is thought to be the world’s oldest cheese has been discovered in a tomb laid across a mummy’s neck.

A 3,600-year-old Bronze Age coffin was opened up in the Xiaohe Cemetery in Xinjiang, China, during an excavation in 2003, where experts found a substance around the neck of the mummified young woman inside.

At the time, experts theorised it was some sort of necklace, but further tests have since revealed that the substance is in fact the oldest piece of cheese in the world.

Qiaomei Fu, a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and an author of the study outlining the findings, explained that the cheese was well-preserved due to the dry climate of the Tarim Basin desert.

She told NBC News: “Regular cheese is soft. This is not. It has now become really dry, dense and hard dust.”

Experts have now been able to study what they believe is the world’s oldest surviving example of cheese. DNA samples of the substance revealed it is kefir cheese, and they also found evidence of cow and goat milk being used.

The study authors wrote: “These 3,500-year-old kefir cheese samples are among the few dairy remains preserved more than 3,000 years and were produced by the Bronze Age Xiaohe population - a population that possesses mixed lifestyles and techniques.”

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