Art of cheese-making is 7,500 years old

Nature ^ | 12-12-2012 | Nidhi Subbaraman

[Renfield]

Traces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments suggest that people have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7,500 years. In the tough days before refrigerators, early dairy farmers probably devised cheese-making as a way to preserve, and get the best use out of, milk from the cattle that they had begun to herd.

Peter Bogucki, an archaeologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, was in the 1980s among the first to suspect that cheese-making might have been afoot in Europe as early as 5,500 bc. He noticed that archaeologists working at ancient cattle-rearing sites in what is now Poland had found pieces of ceramic vessels riddled with holes, reminiscent of cheese strainers. Bogucki reasoned that Neolithic farmers had found a way to use their herds for more than milk or meat1....

[Renfield]

Ping

[Red_Devil 232]

Why not? They knew that they needed a cheese to go with the wines, beers and meads they were making.

[apillar]

But ironically, the Art of Cheese Cutting is much older...

[Charles Henrickson]

"Four ounces of the Aged Neolithic, if you please, stout yeoman."

[allmendream]

As the full article also points out - early humans were lactose intollerant in adulthood - so making cheese out of milk might have been the only way to utilize it as a nutritious resource.

[Wordkraft]

In honor of this I shall name my young daughter Velveeta.

[freedomlover]

Don’t get much call for it around here, sir.

[Renfield]

This skit has a life of its own; there’s even an entry in Wikipedia devoted to it.

Which reminds me...I think I’ll have some Malbec and a slice of Scamorza.

(Back from the kitchen:) Mmmm, good choice!

[Verginius Rufus]

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

[elcid1970]

`Not much call’? It’s the single most popular cheese in the world!

[Revolting cat!]

Cheese older than God's Earth by 1,500 years (more or less)? Halleluyah, I believe!

[a fool in paradise]

Man went to the Moon far earlier than ever reported.

[a fool in paradise]

My daughter married a cheesemaker once. She divorced the deadbeat because he never brought home any bread.

[fnord]

that’s not meant to be taken literally, it applies to all makers of dairy products

[freedomlover]

Not around here, sir.

[freedomlover]

Shut up, big nose!

:)

[Larry Lucido]

Well, yeah. All that walpoling activity made them quite peckish.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Renfield. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.