World's Oldest Cheese Revealed On 3,500-Year-Old Chinese Mummies Buried In The Fearsome Taklamakan Desert

MessageToEagle.com - Scientists have analyzed the bodies of a group of Bronze Age people who were buried in the mysterious Taklamakan Desert and found evidence of cheese dating back to 1,615 BC.
No ever has such an old discovery of cheese been made.
USA Today reports that "the world's best-aged cheese seems to be a lactose-free variety that was quick and convenient to make and may have played a role in the spread of herding and dairying across Asia.
"We not only identified the product as the earliest known cheese, but we also have direct … evidence of ancient technology," says study author Andrej Shevchenko, an analytical chemist at Germany's Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. The method was "easy, cheap … It's a technology for the common people."
The cheese, like the mummies, owes its existence to the extraordinary conditions at Small River Cemetery Number 5, in northwestern China.
First documented by a Swedish archaeologist in the 1930s, it sits in the fearsome Taklamakan Desert, one of the world's largest.

Lumps of cheese, shown with arrowheads, were collected from the neck and chest of a female mummy known as the "Beauty of Xiaohe." Inset shows an enlarged view of a cheese lump. Credit:Yimin Yang and Yusheng Liu
A mysterious Bronze Age people buried dozens of their own atop a large sand dune near a now-dry river, interring their kin underneath what looks like large wooden boats. The boats were wrapped so snugly with cowhide that it's as if they'd been "vacuum-packed," Shevchenko says.
The combination of dry desert air and salty soil prevented decay to an extraordinary degree. The remains and grave goods were freeze-dried, preserving the light-brown hair and strangely non-Asian facial features of the dead along with their felt hats, wool capes and leather boots.
Analysis of the plant seeds and animal tissues in the tombs showed the burials date to 1450 to 1650 BC.

Some of the bodies had oddly shaped crumbs on their necks and chests.By analyzing the proteins and fats in these clumps, Shevchenko and his colleagues determined that they're definitely cheese, not butter or milk. It's not clear why people were buried with bits of cheese on their bodies, Shevchenko says, though perhaps it was food for the afterlife.The analysis also showed the mummies' cheese was made by combining milk with a "starter," a mix of bacteria and yeast.

This technique is still used today to make kefir, a sour, slightly effervescent dairy beverage, and kefir cheese, similar to cottage cheese.
If the people of the cemetery did indeed rely on a kefir starter to make cheese, they were contradicting the conventional wisdom.
Most cheese today is made not with a kefir starter but with rennet, a substance from the guts of a calf, lamb or kid that curdles milk. Cheese was supposedly invented by accident when humans began carrying milk in bags made of animal gut.

 Two hundred mummies were discovered in the 1930s by a Swedish archaeologist in the Taklimakan Desert north of Tibet.
Making cheese with rennet requires the killing of a young animal, Shevchenko points out, and the kefir method does not.


Click on image to enlarge He argues that the ease and low cost of the kefir method would have helped drive the spread of herding throughout Asia from its origins in the Middle East.
Even better, both kefir and kefir cheese are low in lactose, making them edible for the lactose-intolerant inhabitants of Asia. The new results are reported in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The people died around 3,600 years ago but their bodies were preserved because of the air-tight nature of their unusual graves and salty soil.
Scientists have found fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland that date back more than 7,000 years, and there are Danish pots from 5,000 years ago that hold what may be butter or cheese, says bioarchaeologist Oliver Craig of the University of York in Britain. But he agrees that Shevchenko's team has good evidence that their cheese is the record-holder for age.
Craig is more cautious about the new study's suggestion that the cheese was made with kefir starter rather than rennet. That's harder to prove, he says, because the proteins could have decayed too much to provide a definitive answer. He thinks a study of animal bones or pottery is needed to confirm that the cheese at the cemetery was part of a technological spread across Asia.
Whether the cheese was common in its day, it's exceptional now. Usually if a dairy product is left to its own devices, "bacteria will get in and start to eat it away, liquefy it," Craig says. "It's just amazing it survived."

Some of the mummies (pictured) were found to have unusual crumbs on their necks and chest which are now known to ancient cheese. They were preserved - complete with their felt hats - die to the dry conditions of their desert burial Image credit: Wang da Gang
Criag says that fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland, dating back more than 7,000 years, and 5,000-year-old cheese making tools have previously been discovered in Denmark, but no crumbs of ancient cheese as old as that found with the mummies have been recovered before.
It is an extraordinary discovery.
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Rare Serpent-Like Oarfish Surfaces Again! Is This A Sign Of A Coming Earthquake?

MessageToEagle.com - Giant oarfish are very rare serpent-like creatures that live more than 3,000 feet deep underwater.

Now, for the second time a huge oarfish has been discovered and some people fear this think this could be sign of a coming earthquake.

Scientists now say there could be a link between the deaths of the two oarfish.
Oarfish have on rare occasions been caught on video in their natural environment via remotely operated underwater vehicles.


An oarfish can grow to more than 50 feet. It is believed that this giant fish is responsible for myths and legends of sea serpents throughout history.

It is the longest known bone fish and sightings are very rare mainly because the fish lives in deep-water.

This is why the two latest sightings of the oarfish are somewhat puzzling.
Oarfish have a habit of coming to the surface either when sick or dying, or occasionally when they are being beached during wild storms.

According to Japanese believes the appearance of the Slender Oarfish (Regalecus russelii) - the 'Messenger from the Sea God's Palace' - in shallow coastal waters foretells impending earthquakes.

Oarfish that washed ashore in Bermuda in 1860, originally described as a sea serpent. Ellis, R. 1994. Monsters of the Sea. Robert Hale Ltd.


On Sunday, October 13, a marine science instructor snorkeling off the Southern California coast spotted the silvery carcass of the 18-foot-long, serpent-like oarfish. This rare fish was 18-foot-long with eyes the size of half dollars.

An 18-foot oarfish was discovered off Toyon Bay on Catalina Island Sunday. (credit: Catalina Island Marine Institute)
Jasmine Santana of the Catalina Island Marine Institute informs that 15 helpers were needed to drag the giant sea creature to shore.


"We've never seen a fish this big," said Mark Waddington, senior captain of the Tole Mour, CIMI's sail training ship.

"The last oarfish we saw was three feet long."

It is believed that the fish died of natural causes. Tissue samples and video footage were sent to be studied by biologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Now the fish will be buried in the sand until it decomposes and then its skeleton will be reconstituted for display, Waddington said.

Just a few days later, on Friday 18 October a new sighting took place. For the second time in a week, a rare serpent-like oarfish has surfaced in Southern California. According to U-T San Diego, "Beachgoers who saw the carcass wash up on the north side of the south Oceanside jetty, off the 1200 block of North Pacific Street, called police about 5 p.m., Oceanside police Officer Mark Bussey said. A caller told police he thought it was a whale. Bussey and other officers responded as curious onlookers gathered around the silvery creature. At one point, about 50 to 75 people were there, Bussey said.

Police contacted SeaWorld San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A NOAA representative responded to retrieve the fish, which she measured at 13 1/2 feet long. The carcass was cut into sections and removed in coolers for later study."

This oarfish was found washed ashore near the south jetty in Oceanside around 5 p.m. Friday. An 18-foot-long oarfish was found near Catalina earlier in the week. - Photo courtesy of Mark Bussey

On Saturday, Saturday, a day after the beaching of the second oarfish there was a 6.4-magnitude earthquake in the Gulf of California.

These sightings and events have made people worried because of a Japanese legend foretells that oarfish are omens of earthquakes.

Here's what the Daily Telegraph reported in 2010 after more than 16 oarfish washed ashore in - or were caught in nets off the coast of - Japan:

According to traditional Japanese lore, the fish rise to the surface and beach themselves to warn of an impending earthquake - and there are scientific theories that bottom-dwelling fish may very well be susceptible to movements in seismic fault lines and act in uncharacteristic ways in advance of an earthquake - but experts here [in Japan] are placing more faith in their constant high-tech monitoring of the tectonic plates beneath the surface.

"In ancient times Japanese people believed that fish warned of coming earthquakes, particularly catfish," Hiroshi Tajihi, deputy director of the Kobe Earthquake Centre, told the Daily Telegraph.
"But these are just old superstitions and there is no scientific relationship between these sightings and an earthquake," he said.

There are however also scientists who are more cautious. The oarfish, deep-sea dwellers that remain largely mysterious to researchers, have been seen underwater only a handful of times. What is known comes from the few carcasses that have washed ashore.

"If all you knew about deer was road kill … how much would you actually know about deer?" said Milton Love, a research biologist at the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara. "That's kind of where we are with oarfish."

Love said he believes that the deaths of the two fish are probably linked. The most likely cause was a current that carried the weak-swimming creature from still waters into a near-shore, more turbulent area, which they aren't adapted to surviving in.

Experts, however, stress that they have not pinpointed a cause of death.

"With a rare event like this, it is a bit troubling, but it's a total mystery," said Russ Vetter, who assisted in the smaller fish's dissection and directs the fisheries resource division at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

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