Evidence of world's 'oldest' cheese-making found 
 
 The cheese thought to have been made was likely to be a soft, cow's milk type 
 
 Scientists may be one step closer to uncovering the origins of cheese-making, as evidence thousands of years old has been uncovered. What would a Neolithic cheese have tasted like? 
 
 Truly an ancient art, no-one really knows exactly when humans began making cheese. 
 
 But now milk extracts have been identified on 34 perforated pottery vessels or "cheese-strainers", which date back 7,500 years that have been excavated in Poland. 
 
 It is unambiguous evidence for cheese-making in northern Europe during Neolithic times, scientists believe, and the findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature. 
 
 "We analysed some fragments of pottery from the region of Kuyavia [Poland] pierced with small holes that looked like modern cheese-strainers," says Melanie Salque, a postgraduate student at the University of Bristol's Department of Chemistry. 
 
 "They had been thought to be cheese-strainers because of the peculiar presence of holes on the surface. 
 
 "However, they could well have been flame covers, chafing dishes, honey strainers or used for beer-making, to strain out chaff. 
 
 Ms Salque and her team then analysed lipid residues on the vessels and detected milk residues, which they say provides a link to cheese-making. 
 
 "The evidence was stunning," explains Professor Richard Evershed, of Bristol University. 
 
 "If you then put together the fact that there are milk fats in with the holes in the vessels, along with the size of the vessels and knowing what we know about how milk products are processed, what other milk product could it be?" 
 
 Although scientists have not identified a compound of cheese they have put together a convincing case. 
 
 Continue reading the main story Understanding the find: A cheese strainer from Haute-Loire, France, dating back to the beginning of the 20th Century helped inform scientists. 
 
 Modern and ethnographic cheese strainers were used to build up an understanding of how the perforated pottery vessels found in Poland might have been used during Neolithic times. Source: Melanie Salque, Bristol University 
 
 Is it possible that prehistoric people were making cheese much earlier than 7,500 years ago? 
 
 "The most important ingredient for cheese-making is milk and only domesticates can be milked. Thus, it is unlikely that the origins of cheese-making predates the Neolithic," says Ms Salque. 
 
 Earlier examples of milk residues have been detected on pottery vessels from the Near East, dating back 8,000 years, although the evidence did not suggest that they were used for milk processing activities, explains Ms Salque. 
 
 The only other written evidence for cheese-making activity occurs much later in the archaeological record, around 5,000 years ago. 
 
 "The question is how long did it take for people to figure out the technology of transforming that milk into fermented products and eventually into cheese, and that's really hard to say," says Dr Peter Bogucki of Princeton University. 
 
 "I think we can say that it's a key Neolithic innovation to be able to produce a storable product from something perishable and hard to handle like milk, and to do it routinely and repetitively, with continual refinement and that within a few millennia after the domestication of cattle, sheep, and goats we can talk about cheese production." 
 
 What would have prompted Neolithic people to start making cheese? 
 
 Continue reading the main story A history of cheese: Parmesan originates from the 13th century and is mentioned in Giovanni Boccaccio's text "Decameron" - where he describes "a mountain made of grated parmigiano cheese". Parmesan was popular in Britain in the 16th Century when Pope Julius II offered King Henry VIII a gift of a hundred Parmesan cheeses. Brie was the cheese of royalty in France during the 14th Century when it was served at the banquets of kings. The anonymous "bourgeois de Paris" wrote in his diary of events at the time that the severity of surrounding warfare could be measured by whether brie cheeses reached Paris. Cheshire is one of Britain's oldest cheeses, dating back to the 12th Century, soon after the Domesday Book. The variety of cheese making traditions in Britain developed for the first time in medieval times, from about 11th or 12th Century when people in different regions of Britain started experimenting with different styles of cheese production. Source: Andrew Dalby's "Cheese: A Global History" 
 
 Neolithic farming communities were lactose intolerant, so transforming raw milk into cheese made the milk easier to digest, and also easier to preserve and transport, scientists believe. 
 
 "Processing milk into cheese allows the lactose content of milk to be reduced. And genetic and computer simulations have shown that at that time, people were largely lactose intolerant," explains Ms Salque. 
 
 "So making cheese allowed them to consume dairy products without the undesirable health effects." 
 
 "It also shows that humans were not only killing animals for their meat, but also using what animals could produce and go on producing," says Andrew Dalby, author of "Cheese: A Global History." 
 
 Creating cheese from milk was also thought to be a much more economical way of farming in Neolithic times, following the domestication of cattle in the Near East. 
 
 "You can get milk but you can't store milk, so the really important invention is how to store the food value of milk and that really means making cheese," says Mr Dalby. 
 
 The discovery of cheese could also have been accidental, as humans began storing milk in animal stomachs for transportation. 
 
 "The introduction of salt into cheese might have started right from the beginning... perhaps without any conscious thought because you need rennet [a complex of enzymes] to curdle your cheese," says Mr Dalby. 
 
 "If you're in the Near East and you've milked your cow and you put it in a pottery vessel, leave it at 40C in the hot summer heat of Turkey, after two or three hours you've got yoghurt. You can imagine serendipity playing a huge role in this," says Prof Evershed. 
 
 So what might a prehistoric cheese have tasted like? 
 
 Continue reading the main story Agricultural origins: Farming is often thought of as a one of the biggest changes in human history, when people began to produce food rather than just hunt and gather it. Farming reached Britain between about 5000 BC and 4500 BC after coming across Europe from origins in Syria and Iraq between about 11000 BC and 9000 BC. How the dawn of farming changed food 
 
 "The study of animal bones... shows that cattle were the most common domesticates at the sites. So - cow's milk cheese," says Ms Salque. 
 
 "I guess it would have been like the traditional cheese you can get, maybe made simply by curdling milk with rennet. 
 
 "In France we have the Picodon, traditionally made in farms with cow or goats milk, that you curdle and then strain in a cheese strainer... I would imagine that the Prehistoric cheese would have been like this. 
 
 "It's likely to have been a softer cheese." 
 
 Andrew Dalby says the taste of the cheese may have changed according to the season. 
 
 "Similar to those they make in the region of France where I live, the result can be quite different depending on the season. 
 
 "Sometimes they harden and would in fact keep and still give good value months later. 
 
 "It would have been a very long series - hundreds, thousands of years of experiment and that's what resulted in the vast range of cheeses that we have now." 
 
 Follow BBC Food on Pinterest and on twitter: @BBCFood ||||| The shards of old pottery are poked with little holes, remnants of vessels that would have looked a lot like colanders. Now scientists have determined that the fragments — more than 7,000 years old — are most likely from ancient cheese-making implements, used for separating curds from whey. 
 
 Collected from sites along a river in present-day Poland, the pottery pieces are the oldest direct evidence for cheese-making anywhere in the world, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. They help paint a picture of the early beginnings of dairying, an agricultural leap that had profound effects on the cultural history of humankind. 
 
 With the rise of cheese-making, people of the late Neolithic would have had a rich source of nourishment they could exploit — and store — at a time when most adults would not be able to tolerate lactose, said study coauthor Peter Bogucki, an archaeologist at Princeton University. When curds and whey are separated, the vast majority of the lactose remains in whey, making cheese far more gentle on the gut than is milk. 
 
 Bogucki had noticed the hole-studded pottery shards among the more plentiful relics of ancient storage pots during 35 years of excavation work with colleagues in Poland. From bones and other materials, the archaeologists also knew that these early farmers herded cattle in addition to growing crops. 
 
 The team did not dwell on the sieve remnants much. Then, in the early 1980s, Bogucki and his wife stopped to visit a friend in Vermont. In the home were 19th century ceramic vessels pierced with holes — and when asked about them, the friend explained they had been used to make cheese. 
 
 "It set off a few bells ringing," Bogucki said. 
 
 He went on to formally propose that the ancient hole-studded fragments, which have been found at other Central European sites in addition to those in Poland, were used in the making of cheese. But this was only one of several theories. The vessels might have been used for carrying hot coals, separating honey from honeycombs or in the manufacture of beer. 
 
 Now a team led by Richard P. Evershed of the University of Bristol in England has analyzed the sieve fragments and shown that they contain milk-fat residues, sewing up the cheese-making theory. 
 
 The Nature study, co-written by scientists from four Polish institutions, is one of several by Evershed's group that uses chemical techniques to probe old pottery for food residues to determine what people were eating and how they processed their food. 
 
 In 2008, the team reported evidence of milk fats on pieces of pots more than 8,000 years old that were excavated from sites in present-day Turkey, strongly suggestive of cheese processing. 
 
 But although this analysis showed that milk in some form had been stored in the pots, it did not establish for certain that the contents had been cheese. The vessels might have held butter or yogurt or some other lightly processed milk product. 
 
 In contrast, finding dairy residue on an implement like a sieve points strongly toward cheese — especially since similar strainers, be they formed from clay or woven into reed baskets, are still in use today in some cultures around the world, said Paul Kindstedt, a cheese scientist at the University of Vermont in Burlington and author of "Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and its Place in Western Civilization." 
 
 Evershed's team knew of the European sieve shards and were intrigued by Bogucki's theories about them. So in 2010, doctoral student Melanie Salque approached Bogucki and asked whether she could analyze some of the specimens. 
 
 Using just a gram of material at a time, Salque first cleaned the pottery to remove any fats on the surface that had come from handling by archaeologists. Then she crushed the pottery into powder, extracted any fats trapped in the clay pores, then used chemical analysis to separate and identify them. 
 
 Of 50 pottery fragments derived from 34 separate sieves, about 40% contained fats. In the vast majority of cases, those samples were rich in animal fats, such as palmitic acid and stearic acid, and not in fats from other sources such as plants or beeswax. By measuring carbon isotopes, the team showed that these residues came from milk and not fatty tissue. 
 
 As their sophistication grew, farmers would have developed a broader array of cheeses, culminating in the thousands — mild to overwhelming, tooth-breaking hard to buttery soft — eaten around the world today. But the earliest would have been fairly simple, Kindstedt said. 
 
 Without refrigeration, raw milk would have quickly solidified due to fermentation by lactic-acid-making bacteria picked up from the teats of cows. Jostled, the mass would have separated into curds and whey and produced a soft cheese akin to quark or fromage frais. Potted, salted and buried in the sand, as some cheeses still are today, it would survive some months without rotting, he said. 
 
 Ricotta-like cheeses might have followed: partially fermented milk that is heated till the curds rise to the top and are collected. Rennet cheeses would have come later, he thinks. Coagulated by enzymes in the stomach lining of slaughtered calves, these can be aged longer; they make up most types of cheese made today. 
 
 Cheese, Kindstedt added, would have followed swiftly on the heels of any kind of ancient dairying. 
 
 "The first time they stored milk in a pot, I can almost guarantee that if they didn't use that milk immediately, they would come back and it would be a semi-solid gel," Kindstedt said. "They would be confronted with cheese — it just happens." 
 
 It's gratifying to finally see solid, chemical evidence that the sieves were used for cheese-making, said Oliver Craig, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of York in England. But to him, it also presents a bit of a mystery. 
 
 DNA studies show that genetic mutations giving adults the ability to tolerate lactose swept through the people of Europe during the period from which the sieves date. The rapid spread means the mutation must have offered a big advantage to those who carried it. 
 
 Presumably, the advantage was being able to digest milk without getting sick. But if cheese-making was well underway, why was lactose a problem? 
 
 "Perhaps the sieves were not as effective at removing lactose as we might think," Craig said. Alternatively, he added, the evolution of lactose tolerance may have occurred elsewhere in Europe among people who didn't yet have cheese-making technologies. 
 
 rosie.mestel@latimes.com ||||| Milk fat on 7,000-year old pieces of pottery from Northern Europe provide the earliest evidence that prehistoric people knew how to process perishable milk into transportable and longer-lasting cheese. 
 
 Milk residue has been found in pots from Libya nearly 7,000 years old and on 8,000-year old pots from Northwestern Anatolia, a region that roughly corresponds to modern-day Turkey. That provided evidence that people in those areas used milk, but it wasn’t clear if they processed it into cheese by separating the milk proteins and fat from the liquid. 
 
 Some prehistoric vessels, however, resemble modern cheesemaking equipment. Thirty years ago, archeologists proposed that sieve-like pots were used to separate the chunky curds from the liquid whey. Those curds could then be worked into cheese. But others thought these sieves may have been used for beer making or to strain honey. 
 
 Now Mélanie Salque, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues have identified milk fat on sherds of prehistoric sieve-like bowls from Poland, confirming that the pots were used to process milk. 
 
 To do this, the researchers collected residues from the pottery pieces. They first identified particular fats in the residue by mass. Then the scientists measured the amount of carbon-13, a stable isotope of carbon carrying one extra neutron, in two different kinds of fats. This can determine if they came from milk or body fat of ruminants like cows or goats. Isotopes distinguish body fat from milk fat because the amount of carbon-13 reflects an animal’s diet as well as how its body produces and processes each kind of fat. 
 
 The researchers also analyzed residues from other pots at nearby sites. They were able to tell the difference between containers that held milk and cooking pots containing animal fat. Some of those containers were also rubbed with beeswax, possibly for waterproofing. 
 
 The people who used these containers were lactose intolerant because they lacked the enzyme to process milk sugar. But this sugar remains in the liquid whey during cheesemaking. Knowing now that they could make cheese provides evidence that these early pastoralists were able to gain nutrients from milk without becoming ill from the milk sugar, the researchers write.
– Residents of what is now Poland figured out how to make cheese about 7,500 years ago, reports the BBC. Archeologists have determined that clay vessels unearthed near a river were used to separate curds from whey, a key step in the process. The finding is the earliest such proof of cheese-making, and it would have been a huge innovation in the late Neolothic period, explains the LA Times. For one thing, most adults were lactose-intolerant at the time, and turning milk into cheese would make it easier to digest and thus be an important source of food. (It probably had the consistency of modern cottage cheese.) The discovery also may have helped dairy farming take hold. Ars Technica has more on how the University of Bristol researchers concluded that the pots were used to process milk.