Neolithic Europeans Made Cheese, Yogurt

Discovery News ^ | January 25, 2006 | Jennifer Viegas

[SunkenCiv]

Dirty cooking pots dating to nearly 8,000 years ago reveal that some of Europe's earliest farming communities produced dairy products, such as cheese and yogurt. Two separate studies indicate that Neolithic dairying took place in what are now Romania, Hungary and Switzerland... Craig and his team studied fatty residues stuck on ceramic cooking vessels found at the left bank of the Danube near Romania and at the Great Hungarian Plain. The dirty pots date from 5,950-5500 B.C. Analysis of the fats suggests they belonged to goat or sheep milk... In another paper published in the current Journal of Archaeological Science, Spangenberg and his team conducted a similar study on dirty cooking pot shards found at a site called Arbon Bleiche 3 on the southwestern shore of Lake Constance in Switzerland. The shards date to 3384-3370 B.C. The Swiss scientists compared the carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures of the residues with those of fats found in today's organic milks and cheeses. The residue signatures closely matched those for cow, goat and sheep milk... The researchers theorized that the cheese would have been similar to modern fresh goat cheese and farmer's cheese. Sour cream also likely was produced. Bones that belonged to domestic cows, pigs, goats, sheep and dogs also were found at the Swiss site where numerous individual family farms appear to have been located around 6,000 years ago... In addition to the animal bones, several fish bones also were excavated at the site, along with evidence for hazelnuts, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, crab apples and sloe plums.

[jimtorr]

.......these findings lend support to the idea that the antiquity of dairying lies with the origins of animal domestication in southwest Asia some two millennia earlier, prior to its transmission to Europe in the seventh millennia B.C.......

I would like to know what leads them to believe this. Sadly, no supporting information is included in the short article.

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah, due to a lack of detail, that claim udderly breaks down...

[SunkenCiv]

"If there's cheese fondue, what about cheese fon-don't?" -- George Carlin

[SunkenCiv]

I had to look it up, couldn't remember the bleepin' name.

[wafflehouse]

my thoughts exactly.. some things never change

[SunkenCiv]

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