{"id":5007,"date":"2013-09-04T08:00:48","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/?p=5007"},"modified":"2014-04-28T12:02:03","modified_gmt":"2014-04-28T16:02:03","slug":"worlds-earliest-cheesemakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/worlds-earliest-cheesemakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Genetic Jackpot: Researching the World’s Oldest Cheesemakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Archaeologist Peter Bogucki still remembers that \u201cAha!\u201d moment in 1981 when he realized the mysterious fragments of perforated pottery he\u2019d been uncovering for years at Neolithic farming sites in northern Poland could be evidence of the world\u2019s earliest cheesemakers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was looking at 19th-century sievelike ceramics used for cheese manufacturing at a friend\u2019s home in Grafton, Vermont,\u201d Bogucki said, \u201cand on a long, rainy drive to Boston, it struck me that their similarity to those roughly 7,000-year-old hole-pierced potsherds was beyond coincidental.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bogucki, an associate dean for undergraduate affairs at Princeton University, was a key member of an international team investigating ancient Polish agricultural sites when he made the connection. (The area under investigation\u2014Poland\u2019s Kuyavia region<\/a>\u2014was quite familiar to him. He had started working in Poland as part of his PhD research at Harvard in the 1970s, but his interest in Polish prehistory arose during an undergraduate summer program in Krak\u00f3w. To impress a young woman in the program with his archaeological knowledge, he suggested they visit a local museum. As a result, Neolithic farming cultures in Poland became the focus of his studies, and the young woman became his wife.)<\/p>\n

About three decades after Bogucki\u2019s road-trip realization, a team led by University of Bristol geochemist Richard Evershed suggested testing Bogucki\u2019s cheese theory by sending 50 samples of small chips of potsherd fragments to fellow researcher Me\u0301lanie Salque for chemical analysis.<\/p>\n

\"Peter<\/a><\/p>\n

Tests revealed high levels of milk-fat residues on the artifacts. Since cheese is the only dairy product that requires straining, it was safe to assume these ancient ceramics may have indeed been used for that purpose. Early cheeses, the team theorized, were moist and pungent, resembling ricotta or fromage frais.<\/p>\n

Evidence of the cheese\u00admaking tools\u2014potentially the world\u2019s oldest\u2014caused a sensation when revealed in Nature<\/cite><\/a> last December. But interest\u2014and insights\u2014didn\u2019t end there. Researchers have since theorized that consuming cheese not only added an abundant protein source to the depressingly dull diets of our Neolithic ancestors, it also transformed our DNA.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s amazing to think that cheesemaking might have come about as a result of the inability of ancestral farmers to digest fresh milk,\u201d Evershed writes in an e\u00admail.<\/p>\n

Prior to the advent of cheese, humans typically became lactose intolerant soon after infancy. The domestication of cattle began about 10,000 years ago, and dairying only a millennium later. Genetically speaking, that means it didn\u2019t take long for our ancestors to learn how separating curds from lactose\u00ad-rich whey made an easier\u00ad-to-\u00addigest product. But was there a deeper incentive (other than creating prototype cheeseburgers, of course)?<\/p>\n

\u201cOne idea is that drinking [animal] milk\u2026 supplemented breast milk, and enabled mothers to wean their children more quickly,\u201d says Mark Stoneking, an evolutionary genetics expert at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (Stoneking wasn\u2019t involved in the study). \u201cSince most women aren\u2019t fertile while nursing, the earlier a child is weaned, the sooner the woman will become fertile again and can thus have more children. So maybe the advantage was that it enabled women to have more children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bogucki agrees, adding that Stoneking\u2019s ideas about birth spacing \u201cmight have made cheese a particularly attractive resource to hunter-\u00adgatherers to draw them into the farming way of life. And farmers want to minimize birth spacing due to the need for agricultural labor that is undermined by high childhood mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

There could have been an additional economic factor, Bogucki adds: Cheesemaking may have \u201cprovided an opportunity to transform an abundant but unwieldy resource (cow\u2019s milk) into a storable and transportable substance (cheese).\u201d<\/p>\n

While none of these theories are yet verified as fact, what remains intriguing is the possibility that the cheese production pioneered by early Europeans bred a biological change in humankind, eventually leading to our ability to consume dairy products\u2014and promote our love of cheese\u2014well into adulthood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early cheesemaking tools could provide clues about human evolution and neolithic cheesemaking techniques<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5009,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[433],"class_list":["post-5007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cheese-iq"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGenetic Jackpot: Researching the World's Oldest Cheesemakers - culture: the word on cheese<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Early cheesemaking tools could provide clues about human evolution and the world\u2019s earliest cheesemakers\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/worlds-earliest-cheesemakers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Genetic Jackpot: Researching the World's Oldest Cheesemakers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Early cheesemaking tools could provide clues about human evolution and the world\u2019s earliest cheesemakers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/worlds-earliest-cheesemakers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"culture: the word on cheese\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/grantgbradley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-09-04T12:00:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-04-28T16:02:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/geneticjackpot_featured.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"605\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"270\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Joseph A. 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