3,600-year-old cheese on ancient mummy

The world's oldest cheese, dating back more than 3,600 years, was discovered on the necks and chests of intact mummies in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Small pieces of cheese (marked in white) on the neck of a mummy. Photo: Discovery News

The small pieces of cheese are pale yellow and have been dated to 1615 BC, according to researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics in Urumchi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

These cheese pieces were found during archaeological excavations from 2002-2004 at the Xiaohe burial site, in the Taklamakan Desert in northwestern China.

The Xiaohe Cemetery is built on a natural sand dune and contains hundreds of mysterious mummies in large wooden coffins. Through DNA testing, the people in the coffins have been identified as having European and Asian origins, Discovery News quoted an expert from the Max Planck Institute in Germany as saying.

According to the research team, ancient people may have believed that cheese was buried with the dead so they could enjoy it in the afterlife. The discovery provides direct research evidence of ancient milk fermentation methods.

Cheese making was known in northern Europe around the beginning of the 6th millennium BC, and was widespread in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. Prior to this discovery, researchers had never found cheese from that age.

According to vnexrpess