World’s Oldest Cheese: Traces Found In Pottery Recovered From Croatia

Traces of world’s oldest cheese have been found in pottery, or rhyta, in Croatia, pushing back the dawn of cheese making in the Mediterranean around 7,700 years ago, about 500 years before the presence of the fermented products.

An international team of researchers has reportedly found traces of fatty acids on fragments of pottery recovered from a Neolithic excavation site in the villages of Pokrovnik and Danilo Bitinj on the Dalmatian coast.

The researchers from Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh and Pennsylvania State universities, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Sibenik City Museum analyzed the traces to conclude the sieve-like pottery vessels were used to strain curd out of whey to make cheese. They used carbon dating techniques to examine the recovered pottery.

The new discovery implies that human beings were making cheese 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, pushing the date back from the Bronze Age to the Neolithic era.

Researchers believe that as the cheese was longer lasting than liquid milk, it enabled early farming to spread into cooler central and northern areas.

“We know that the consumption of milk and dairy products would have had many advantages for early farming populations because milk, yogurt, and cheese are a good source of calories, protein and fat,” said Dr. Clayton Magill, who is a research fellow at the Heriot-Watt’s Lyell Centre.

Magill added that cheese has even been reliable food between harvests or during droughts and famines.

The DNA analysis of the population shows that early farmers were lactose-intolerant at the time but children were able to drink milk until age 10. As the process of making cheese, which includes the fermentation process, decreases milk’s lactose levels, it became another food option for adults and children.

The study results have been published in the journal PLOS ONE.