
Evidence of 7,200-year-old cheese-making found on the Dalmatian Coast - XzetaU8
https://news.psu.edu/story/534928/2018/09/05/research/evidence-7200-year-old-cheese-making-found-dalmatian-coast
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GW150914
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.

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ahoka
Cheese making most likely predates milk consumption. Don't forget that
digesting lactose is a relatively new mutation, and not even universal today.

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ekianjo
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.

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evgen
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.

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ekianjo
> 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:

[http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/3/1279](http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/3/1279)

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Hasz
I wonder if there's any salvageable yeast DNA on the pots. Would love to see
some ancient strains!

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djur
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.

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lisper
That seems improbable. Doesn't the strain of bacteria used determine what kind
of cheese comes out the other end of the process?

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ycombinete
That, and what fungus, if any grows on/in the cheese

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tomcam
The vessels are gorgeous.

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nqzero
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

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mythrwy
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).

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posterboy
"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.

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moab9
and bless-ed were they

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uistp
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...](https://www.nature.com/news/art-of-cheese-making-
is-7-500-years-old-1.12020)

This nature article from 2012 makes an almost identical claim.

