Slashdot Mirror
Humans Have Been Eating Cheese For At Least 7,500 Years
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found conclusive evidence for the first time that humans have been making cheese since the 6th millennium BC."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Thanks. That question has been keeping me up nights.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
for many many eons. :)
Blessed are the cheese makers.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
...that people back in those days actually believed that the moon was one BIG ball of cheese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_is_made_of_green_cheese
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
People must have looked on and though, "What they heck is he/she doing there?!? Oh my!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Cheese is made from milk.
Try to put a sauce named "hovmästarsås" on your cheese. So good it becomes hard to eat cheese without it. Those ignorant Swedes waste it entirely on salmon (hence its second name, "gravlaxsås") which is a profanation. Can be often bought in IKEAs, or made on your own.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This may come as a shock to you, but some of us find our history interesting and want to learn something other than the difference between the GPL 2.0 and GPL 3.0 or how much skin some "genius" chews off his foot in public places. This is interesting because it represented a huge leap forward for humans. It meant a greater variety of food sources were available which makes eating a much more stable proposition. It also meant that people could start making longer term plans.
When those sorts of things happen the result is time to pursue things like "knowledge" and a greater understanding of the world around us. The reason that dweebs like us are free to enrich ourselves (i.e. browse pr0n on the web) is because it takes fewer people to produce the food that we eat. Obtaining sustenance is kinda high up on the list of priorities and is something everybody either does or thinks about multiple times per day.
So yeah, this is kind of big news. This is a case where the information is in the main stream media because it is interesting for us as well as for the normals. Rather than complain that other people are interested in nerdy shit we should be happy that other people still have enough of a sense of curiosity to learn about this instead of simply trying to reach for the remote why spilling their cheetos all over themselves as they try to turn to the cartoon channel to get away from intesmegmalectual crap like this.
Oh yeah, and next time you see something that is not interesting to you, you might want to try not complaining about it rather than trying to belittle anyone around you who might find it interesting. You know, kinda like the assholes who are always scoffing at your interest in the latest developments in the Python code base and how it impacts the postgrsql connector class.
+1 Insightful.
Fermentation is not the same thing as spoiling.
You've never heard of aged beef?
it gave the guy that walked behind him nightmares.
There are many different minority groups in China. Groups such as the Mongols have made cheese for thousands of years. The majority Han population make and use cheese, but it seems to be more of an imported idea from other cultures.
Making and eating cheese, beer, and bread define what it is to be fully human. Any dirty ape can go club a mammoth and bring it back to its den, but to domesticate two different kinds of creatures (a mammal and a bacterium, or a grass and a yeast) and use one to rot the other and come out with something even tastier than the original? That requires massive intelligence, communication, tool use, planning, and social structure.
(PS: if any modern cultures exist that don't eat cheese, beer, or bread, I don't mean to imply that they're not fully human. Their current environment might not have the resources to do these things, but you can bet their ancestors knew how.)
I remember seeing a scientific magazine discussing the history and chemistry of bread and beer, and how it was unclear which came first in history or whether or not one helped lead to the other.
That article was 20 years ago, and it is probably only one of 3 articles I can even remember specifically from the history of that magazine.
The interests of "nerds" are varied, and honestly I think you are an idiot and don't really understand "nerd" culture (no pun intended) if you are so narrow-minded that you think that the history of cheese isn't something that would not be interesting to a significant number of nerds.
The stomach of a young mammal naturally turns milk into curds and when. It solidifies the milk so that it digests more slowly, and the young mammal gets more out of it. Our ancestors turned breast milk into a primitive cheese, in their stomachs.
When a baby spits up milk, think about what it looks like - it's curds. Our ability to make curds from milk disappears about the same time our so-called milk-teeth start falling out.
As a result, to make cheese, you need the stomach lining of a young mammal to turn your milk to curds. Old mammals have lost the ability.
Wikipedia knows not all. According to this history, a flat bread baked with cheese on top goes back as far as the 6th century BC and the "modern" pizza goes back as far as the early 1500s.
I worked at a cheese shop when I was in University and we sold cheese from all over the world. I always thought it odd that there was no cheese from China. There's Cheese from India, the middle east, europe, south america. Just about everywhere. I can't recall any cheese coming from the far east, and I've never seen cheese a chinese restaurant (except the big buffet ones that server everything from french fries to kraft dinner to General Tao's chicken to tripe) I don't recall any cheese from Africa either. I wonder why some cultures developed cheese while others didn't. Why, even if they hadn't invented it on their own, why they didn't start making it once the cultures mixed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Hey! See that thing over there with the legs? Let's make stuff from the stuff that comes out of it.
This is technically descriptive of the male contribution to sexual reproduction.
It was prophesied somewhere in the first 6 books of the Aeneid that Aeneas and his men would someday be so hungry, they would eat their plates.
Somewhere in the second 6 books, there came a time, after a battle or something, when they had broken all their dinnerware. Someone had the idea to flatten out some dough, put the food on top of it and cook them all together, baking the bread and cooking the food at the same time. While they were eating, Aeneas' son Iulus said hey look everybody, we're eating our plates! Most thought it was just a joke and laughed, but the elders didn't laugh. They were amazed and recognized it as the fulfillment of prophesy made before Iulus was born.
So when you're in Italy and you hear of some restaurant claiming to have invented pizza in medieval times, be sure to ask them, really? How was it that Virgil was able to discuss something that your restaurant hadn't invented yet? Or something similarly snarky.
Two big shocks on entering American food/drink culture coming from the UK. A big one was how much a bar != a pub. But bigger was for a nation who consumes so much food, how can its cheese be this bad? 300 million people, surely there's room for a few hundred local decent cheeses? Are there any excellent and widely available varieties?
Pretty much every culture has its version of the pancake, and has had it or variations of it for millennia. Pancakes in its various iterations is one of the oldest recipes out there (sorry I couldn't find the reference off two minutes of googling, but it's basically contemporary with agriculture itself if memory serves). Thus, you can be pretty sure someone tried pancakes with cheese in an oh-so-unmodern way. It's not exactly pizza, but it's pretty close.
First visit was 20 years ago, San Fran and various towns and cities around. Monterey Jack was the most daring on casual display. We found some peppery cheddar in a shop in Sonoma that was interesting, but it reminded us of fruit beers- different taste to the bland, but adding things to the mix ain't the answer.
We spent 3 months in the US a couple of years back, across about 8 states. So not just checking out the airport transit store cracker-toppings. Instead of shouting at me, CONVENIENCE, FFS, answer the question. What is a good and widely available cheese now? Something with bite, texture, maybe even mould.
The phrase "fist cheese" is completely nonsensical by any literal reading, and yet evokes such images of horror and disgust that I am searching around right now for my mind bleach.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
You don't actually see any cheese in China, unless you go to posh restaurant which provides foreign food.
Not only a greater variety food but cheese has a number of qualities that make it useful and as you said a leap forward. It keeps well, it's high energy food for its volume and weight*, it's a way to preserve excess milk for later and it tastes good. Pretty valuable stuff I'd say.
* Which makes it good take along food for traveling.
ACtpm
Cheese is made from milk.
Unless it's Edam, which is made backwards....
.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
I'm more enamored with the imagined scenario when they encounter goatse, inadvertently rickroll themselves, then, stumbling away in terror, falling into the pits of 4chan, crawling out of that, only to fall of the cliff into youtube comments.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti