World's Oldest Cheese Was Snack for 3,500-Year-Old Chinese Mummy in Afterlife
By Hannah Osborne , February 27, 2014 10:56 AM GMT
The world's oldest cheese has been discovered on the necks and chests of mummies in China, dating to over 3,500 years old.
Cheese discovered with mummies in China's Taklamakan Desert was dated by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, USA Today reports.
They found the cheese dated to 1615 BCE, making it the oldest ever discovered by a long way.
Study author Andrej Shevchenko said: "We not only identified the product as the earliest known cheese, but we also have direct ... evidence of ancient technology [that is] easy, cheap ... It's a technology for the common people."
The cheese was preserved with the mummies at the Small River Cemetery Number 5, first discovered by Swedish archaeologists in the 1930s.
The cemetery included a group of Bronze Age people buried on top of a large sand dune underneath what appears to be large wooden boats. These boats were packed with cowhide so well that they created a "vacuum-packed" effect.
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