Chinese scientists find world’s oldest cheese buried with mummies in Xinjiang desert

DNA tests suggest Bronze Age people who lived in far west China 3,500 years ago made kefir cheese, challenging beliefs about ancient diets

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Chinese scientists say a mysterious substance found smeared on the heads and necks of Tarim Basin mummies is a type of soft cheese made from a fermented dairy drink. Photo: Handout / Li Wenying

Published: 11:00pm, 25 Sep 2024Updated: 12:02am, 26 Sep 2024

Chinese scientists say they have discovered the world’s oldest known cheese, dating back around 3,500 years, buried alongside mummies in the Tarim Basin in far west China.

The team found the DNA of goats and fermenting microbes from Bronze Age dairy samples scattered around the necks of mummies in coffins at the Xiaohe cemetery in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

“It appears that the Xiaohe population actively adopted animal husbandry from steppe culture and that the related fermented milk product, kefir cheese, became an important part of the Xiaohe culture and subsequently spread further in inland East Asia,” they said in a new study.

The researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University Third Hospital, the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute and Xinjiang University published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Cell on Wednesday.

Kefir is a fermented drink made with milk and kefir grains and has a thinner consistency than yogurt drinks. It is drained to produce a soft cheese.

The three dairy samples analysed in the study have been identified as kefir cheese because of the “presence and abundance of proteins from ruminant milk, lactic acid bacteria and yeast in the samples”, the paper states.