'Sophisticated': ancient faeces shows humans enjoyed beer and blue cheese 2,700 years ago:
It's no secret that beer and blue cheese go hand in hand – but a new study reveals how deep their roots run in Europe, where workers at a salt mine in Austria were gorging on both up to 2,700 years ago.
Scientists made the discovery by analysing samples of human excrement found at the heart of the Hallstatt mine in the Austrian Alps. Frank Maixner, a microbiologist at the Eurac Research Institute in Bolzano, Italy, who was the lead author of the report, said he was surprised to learn salt miners more than two millennia ago were advanced enough to "use fermentation intentionally."
"This is very sophisticated in my opinion," Maixner said. "This is something I did not expect at that time."
The finding was the earliest evidence to date of cheese ripening in Europe, according to researchers. And while alcohol consumption is certainly well documented in older writings and archaeological evidence, the salt miners' faeces contained the first molecular evidence of beer consumption on the continent at that time.
"It is becoming increasingly clear that not only were prehistoric culinary practices sophisticated, but also that complex processed foodstuffs as well as the technique of fermentation have held a prominent role in our early food history," Kerstin Kowarik, of the Museum of Natural History Vienna, said. The town of Hallstatt, a Unesco World Heritage Site, has been used for salt production for more than 3,000 years.
Journal Reference:
Frank Maixner, Mohamed S. Sarhan, Kun D. Huang, et al. Hallstatt miners consumed blue cheese and beer during the Iron Age and retained a non-Westernized gut microbiome until the Baroque period. Current Biology, 2021 (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.031)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 17 2021, @02:39PM (3 children)
Faeces recognition technology is out of control.
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Sunday October 17 2021, @02:49PM
Just goes to show that any old shit is news these days.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Tork on Sunday October 17 2021, @03:06PM (1 child)
I tried to sign up for Faecesbook and they demanded a photo!!
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18 2021, @01:40AM
It's to confirm that you really are an ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @04:54PM (8 children)
Yes but whatabout bbq sauce? I want to know the history of BBQ.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @05:10PM (7 children)
Any moron knows, you can't have BBQ sauce without Ketchup. You can't have Ketchup without tomatoes. Everybody knows that until the great tomato wars of Spain, that this wasn't even a thing. Christ man, get with the times.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fishybell on Sunday October 17 2021, @05:29PM (6 children)
Ignoring the farcical idea that nobody ate tomatoes until the Europeans came west, what really is BBQ sauce? There are different types that contain no tomatoes, like, for example Carolina BBQ sauce, which has a mustard base.
My answer is BBQ sauce is any sauce designed to take low-quality or leftover meat (the original purpose before BBQ became its own delicacy in our modern culture) so really any liquidy substance applied to meat meets my definition.
So when did condiments come into play, and when was the first condiment applied to meat? Probably ancient Indian civilization looking at the (extremely limited) history section on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] listing Ancient Rome, India, Greece, and China as having used condiments.
Also, a more pertinent complaint about this article (because that's really what we do here): there's evidence of much [timesofisrael.com] older [bbc.com] beer. So is this just an article about the first evidence of blue cheese? Does the addition of beer make the consumer of said cheese sophisticated, or is it the cheese alone (as it's likely beer is what most people drank all the time)?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:35PM (3 children)
I have no idea when cheese was first invented, but I suspect that the first cheeses, without any modern refrigeration available, probably all had visible mold strains. Whether they would have tasted or looked like bleu cheese I again have no idea, but they probably would not have resembled any modern supermarket cheese.
Beer, mead and any similar beverages probably date back to the earliest times man-like creatures noticed strange things happening when grain was soaked in water containers too long or fruits were left to ripen far beyond the point they were normally consumed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:48PM (1 child)
Cows were first domesticated ~10k years ago, so cheese is probably about that old give or take a few hundred years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18 2021, @09:31AM
Cheese has been around as long as toes have been around, so well before 10,00 years ago.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @11:25PM
Blessed are the Cheesemakers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:59PM (1 child)
Nobody in Europe, Africa or Asia did, because tomatoes did not exist on those continents before Columbian contact.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @11:09PM
Well then I want to know the Aztec history of BBQ, in addition to the non-tomato history of Korean BBQ from the Goguryeo era.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18 2021, @11:19AM
I'm glad I live today and don't have to eat those things
(Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Monday October 18 2021, @03:00PM
Any Neanderthal enjoys cheese and beer. Did they listen to Brubeck while playing bridge?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base