Fascinating, but not really surprising. Some dates we have set for the advent of a given technology represent the challenges of archaeology rather than what is believed to really be the start of something. Making some form of fermented grain/fruit, fermenting dairy, baking bread all are just too easy to stumble on and represent too much of an advantage to age been anything like as recent as we’ve often thought them to be. It’s still more than just cool when a date gets set back by five thousand years though!
I wonder if this is something that has been a continuous feature of human existence for all of this time, or if different groups rediscovered the tech over and over? If you’re getting dairy, then you’re going to rapidly realize how useful a cow’s stomach is to hold milk. If you engage in any level,or animal husbandry you’ll end up with dead calves, and if you put milk in one of their stomachs... boom... the tech is revealed.
What’s even more interesting is the hypothesis that fermented milk products like yoghurt and cheese made it possible to: 1, farm further north as it provided a way to store energy for later consumption and 2, non-human milk also allowed women to ween children earlier which in turn made it possible to reduce the reproduction cycle and grow the pop. faster, which given disease back then, meant they could successfully colonize new lands.
Not sure though - how could you discover cheese if you were not actively storing and processing milk in the first place? I think they are closely intertwined.
Lactose intolerance is something that develops as you age, but being able to digest lactose is a critical ability for childhood survival. Dairy is perfectly fine for children, even for most of the children who will develop lactose intolerance later in life.
It's a neat idea, but I don't know if it would actually work.
Cheese is fermented by lactic acid bacteria, not yeast. From my limited knowledge of lactic acid fermentation, there really isn't the same diversity of starters as there is in yeast fermentation. At least, I've never heard of people cultivating or buying particular strains of lactobacillus in the same way beer brewers select particular strains of yeast.
i recently stumbled upon cheese-making by accident. and it turns out it's trivially easy. and with raw milk, it probably wasn't just easy but almost unavoidable once you were milking cows
cheese making has 3 stages. milk is curdled, then strained, then pressed, and then optionally aged (i haven't tried aging yet)
raw milk curdles itself and the whey could be strained out as easily as pouring it on a bed of grass or leaves and pressed by hand or with the weight of a stone in that same bed of grass. the result is cheese
i can't buy raw milk, so my process is a bit different. i make yogurt, strain with a piece of fabric, and then press with a potato ricer
making yogurt with pasteurized skim (or near skim, or non-homogenized) is trivially easy once the bacteria exists - inoculate with a starter (which can be as easy as adding milk to a "dirty" vessel) and let it sit till it curdles. for my first batch i used stonyfield to inoculate, and have used my own yogurt (or whey) as the starter since then. heat the mixture to 110°F and let it sit for several hours. there are also strains that work at room temp (but i haven't tried them). the result isn't as thick as commercial yogurt, but it's easier to strain. homogenized milk with fat doesn't produce a strong enough curd to strain, but that's a modern problem
I wonder if this is something that has been a continuous feature of human existence for all of this time, or if different groups rediscovered the tech over and over? If you’re getting dairy, then you’re going to rapidly realize how useful a cow’s stomach is to hold milk. If you engage in any level,or animal husbandry you’ll end up with dead calves, and if you put milk in one of their stomachs... boom... the tech is revealed.