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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DNA Analysis Of Paracas Elongated Skulls Released. The Results Prove They Were Not fully Homo sapiens

February 6, 2014

Paracas is a desert peninsula located within the Pisco Province in the Ica Region, on the south coast of Peru. It is here were Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, made an amazing discovery in 1928, a massive and elaborate graveyard containing tombs filled with the remains of individuals with the largest elongated skulls found anywhere in the world. 

These have come to be known as the 'Paracas skulls'. In total, Tello found more than 300 of these elongated skulls, which are believed to date back around 3,000 years. 

A DNA analysis has now been conducted on one of the skulls and expert Brien Foerster has released preliminary information regarding these enigmatic skulls. It is well-known that most cases of skull elongation are the result of cranial deformation, head flattening, or head binding, in which the skull is intentionally deformed by applying force over a long period of time. 

It is usually achieved by binding the head between two pieces of wood, or binding in cloth. However, while cranial deformation changes the shape of the skull, it does not alter its volume, weight, or other features that are characteristic of a regular human skull. The Paracas skulls, however, are different.

Wikipedia Commons

The cranial volume is up to 25 percent larger and 60 percent heavier than conventional human skulls, meaning they could not have been intentionally deformed through head binding/flattening. 

They also contain only one parietal plate, rather than two. The fact that the skulls' features are not the result of cranial deformation means that the cause of the elongation is a mystery, and has been for decades.

Mr. Juan Navarro, owner and director of the local museum, called the Paracas History Museum, which houses a collection of 35 of the Paracas skulls, allowed the taking of samples from 5 of the skulls. 

The samples consisted of hair, including roots, a tooth, skull bone and skin, and this process was carefully documented via photos and video. The samples were sent to the late Lloyd Pye, founder of the Starchild Project, who delivered the samples to a geneticist in Texas for DNA testing.   

The results are now back, and Brien Foerster, author of more than ten books and an authority on the ancient elongated headed people of South America, has just revealed the preliminary results of the analysis. He reports on the geneticist's findings:

"It had mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far. But a few fragments I was able to sequence from this sample indicate that if these mutations will hold we are dealing with a new human-like creature, very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans."

The implications are huge. "I am not sure it will even fit into the known evolutionary tree," Foerster wrote. He added that if the Paracas individuals were so biologically different, they would not have been able to interbreed with humans.

The results need to be replicated and more analysis undertaken before final conclusions can be drawn.

Source: ADG (UK) via Paracas History Museum / Brian Foerster Interview

Source: http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/dna-analysis-of-paracas-elongated-skulls-released-the-results-prove-they-were-not-human/