Researchers in Poland have discovered shards of old pottery they believe are part of ancient cheese-making implements that were used to separate curds from whey. The fragments, over 7,000 years old, are the oldest evidence for cheese making anywhere in the world, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday.
The study, lead by Princeton University study coauthor Peter Bogucki, found that the rise of cheese making in the late Neolithic would prove beneficial to humans at the time, most of whom would not be able to tolerate lactose. Cheese is far gentler on the stomach than milk because the majority of lactose remains in whey when it is separated from curds, the LA Times reported.
According to the Times, Bogucki first found the hole-studded pottery shards during 35 years of excavation work with other researchers in Poland. It was not until the 1980s that he began to understand the significance of the shards. A team led by University of Bristol's Richard P. Evershed later confirmed his cheese making theory after finding milk-fat residues on the pottery fragments.
Evershed's team also discovered milk fats on pots over 8,000 years old in 2008 in present-day Turkey. However, the LA Times reports that the latest discovery point more towards cheese than the Turkey findings do. Paul Kindstedt, a cheese scientist at the University of Vermont in Burlington, told the Times that the Polish findings are more likely to be related to cheese making because similar strainers are still used today in some cultures.
In 2010, Melanie Salque, a member of Evershed's team, approached Boguki to analyze the shards. After analyzing 50 pottery shards from 34 different sieves, the team discovered that nearly 40 percent of them contained fats. The fats were found to be a majority rich in animal fats, the LA Times reported.
"I think we can say that it's a key Neolithic innovation to be able to produce a storable product from something perishable and hard to handle like milk, and to do it routinely and repetitively, with continual refinement and that within a few millennia after the domestication of cattle, sheep and goats we can talk about cheese production," Boguki told the BBC.
The BBC reported that Neolithic people were lactose intolerant, making cheese an easier form of milk to digest, as well as preserve and transport. "So making cheese allowed them to consume dairy products without the undesirable health effects," Salque told the BBC.
Andrew Dalby, author of "Cheese: A Global History," added, "It also shows that humans were not only killing animals for their meat, but also using what animals could produce and go on producing."
The study was published in the Wednesday issue of the journal The Nature.