It is difficult to trace the oldest cheese in the world, although we have direct evidence that humans have consumed milk for thousands of years.
Archaeologists have identified milk residues on ancient pots unearthed from many regions of the world.
Studying the carbon isotopes of fatty acids in pot residues has revealed that humans consumed milk in Britain from 4000BC and as long ago as 7000BC in Anatolia, a region in Turkey known for its farming during the Neolithic period.
Anatolian farmers migrated far and wide. Milk fat traces don’t often survive millennia underground, but the high number of Anatolian pottery fragments has led scientists to speculate that milk must have been used to create longer-lasting dairy products such as cheese.
Turning the milk into cheese would also have reduced levels of the sugar lactose at a time when lactose intolerance was the norm across Europe.
It wasn't until around 3,000 years ago that a genetic mutation became widespread, enabling adults to produce lactase, an enzyme that breaks lactose down to other sugars.
In 2023, a University of York study found protein structures in late Neolithic pots from Poland that were likely to have come from cheese made with milk from cows, goats or sheep.
The oldest cheese samples to survive to this day are around 3,500 years old, found around the necks of Bronze Age mummies in Xiaohe Cemetery in northwest China.
A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences analysed the specimens to identify a kefir (bacteria-fermented milk) cheese. The scientists found DNA from different bacterial and yeast species in the cheese, including Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii, which are found in kefirs to this day.
They think that the lumps may be kefir starter grains – concentrated bacterial colonies used to kickstart cheese fermentation. At the time, these grains were perhaps considered a precious gift to take into an afterlife.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Scott Mills, Watford) 'What's the world's oldest cheese?'
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