
A 6k-year-old fruit fly gave the world modern cheeses and yogurts - sohkamyung
https://theconversation.com/a-6-000-year-old-fruit-fly-gave-the-world-modern-cheeses-and-yogurts-128165
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Shorel
A traditional Bulgarian way to make yogurt is to put ants in the milk.

[http://www.ayurvedic-recipes.com/prigotvjane-na-kiselo-
mljak...](http://www.ayurvedic-recipes.com/prigotvjane-na-kiselo-mljako) One
of the last paragraphs.

This means the required bacteria were present in the environment and this
process has been repeated intentionally several times.

The article affirmation that it happened once because of a fly and then the
new bacterial strain survived seems a bit naive, considering bacteria mix
their genes all the time.

~~~
grawprog
>A traditional Bulgarian way to make yogurt is to put ants in the milk.

I wonder of the formic acid in ants has anything to do with helping the
curdling process. Ants have fairly acidic bodies, they taste like lemon when
you eat them....yes I have eaten ants.

~~~
daveslash
Carpenter ants taste far far _far_ worse than lemon. They taste like burning.
As there are over 1,000 species of carpenter ants, I can't tell you
specifically which species, but they are the black and brown ones that are
common in Maine.

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superkuh
It's a nice, even a probable, idea. I suppose it's good enough to try to hook
readers in to the actual science. The paper itself has no talk of fruit flies
and no support for this claim.

~~~
romaaeterna
Come on, look at the graphical abstract to the paper. And notice the
references to "insect-associated species K. lactis var. drosophilarum"

~~~
superkuh
You're absolutely right. My ctrl-f search for "fly" returned nothing, with
javascript off I have no graphics on that page, and reading the introduction
and skimming the rest didn't mention them but that's no real excuse. Thanks
for the correction.

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flocial
"The milk-producing animals cow, sheep, and goat were all domesticated between
8,000 and 10,000 years ago [20 ], and paleoproteomic analysis of dental
calculus has shown that humans were consuming milk, most likely as cheese or
other fermented products, by 5,500 years ago [21 ]. "

I wonder if 500 years is a reasonable rounding error for this time span or
just making the headline more reader "friendly".

[https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...](https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(19\)31384-3)

~~~
wyattpeak
That 5500 is a terminus ante quem[1], the time before which - not the time at
which - humans must have started consuming milk products. I don't know whether
the 6000 year number is based on anything, but changing it to 5500 wouldn't
make the title any more correct. You'd have to explicitly mention that it was
a bound, which is probably a bit much for a headline.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_post_quem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_post_quem)

~~~
burmer
Unless the fruit fly was already 500 years old at the time

~~~
simonh
But don't we already know it was 6k years old?

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mannykannot
Now I am wondering why K. lactis is preferred over K. marxianus, given that
the latter was the source of the former's ability to metabolize lactose. The
paper mentions a dairy strain of K. marxianus, but does not elaborate.

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solidsnack9000
Reading things like this in a paper about microbes, I wonder: why is the
English speaking world so trashy?

 _...a little bit of illicit sex made all of this possible._

~~~
tomcooks
It's not an "English speaking" thing, nor "trashy".

Moreover, that is not a paper; it's a blog article written with, and I quote
the website's colophon, "Academic rigour, journalistic flair".

Or "calm down ur tits m8 get laid or smt" as an actually trashy english
speaker would say.

~~~
solidsnack9000
Reading this as journalism I still wonder, why is the English speaking world
so trashy?

