We’ve Been Making Cheese for a Long Time

This is the second story this week that I’ve posted about cheese. No, I’m not suddenly interested in cheese, it just turned out that way.

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.

via Humans Could’ve Started Making Cheese At Least 7,500 Years Ago – Reason 24/7 : Reason.com.