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Tarim Basin cheese
Oldest known cheese
Lumps of kefir-style cheese were found on mummies in China's Xiaohe cemetery, which dates to about 1600 BCE.
The study, published in the journal Cell in September 2024 and led by Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined white, cheese-like lumps found on mummies from the Xiaohe cemetery in China's Tarim Basin. The mummies there date to roughly 3,300 to 3,600 years ago, in the Bronze Age.
DNA from the lumps showed that they were made with a kefir starter, a mix of bacteria and yeast that ferments milk. The species identified included the bacterium Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and the yeast Pichia kudriavzevii. The milk came from both cattle and goats, and different batches appear to have used different milk.
'Oldest known cheese' here means the oldest physical sample of cheese itself. Chemical traces in much older pottery from Europe, from about 7,000 years ago, suggest people were already making cheese-like dairy products then. The dry desert conditions are what preserved the lumps.
Dating the lumps relies on the age of the burials they were found with, which is itself an estimate from radiocarbon dating. The ages quoted therefore carry a margin of a few centuries. The cheese was probably buried as food for the afterlife, and the Tarim Basin mummies were naturally preserved by the arid, salty ground.