When Was Cheese Invented?

How ancient is the art of cheese-making? No one really knows because (apparently) the implements used to make ancient cheeses have not survived. Archaeologists suggest that maybe cheese-making began around 5000-5,500 years ago. Perhaps it was a little earlier.

Cheese can be made from goat milk and some people speculate cheese may have been discovered or invented as much as 8,000 years ago — when goats were domesticated.

Another possible source of ancient cheese could be the domesticated horse. Research over the past few years suggests that the Botai Culture of about 7,500 years ago domesticated horses. More recent research seems to confirm that the Botai had domesticated horses.

The idea that horses might have been domesticated in the area that is now Kazakhstan about 7,000 years ago was first proposed decades ago. The problem with domesticated horses is that they don’t look much different from wild horses, so there are darned few traces of the earliest domesticated horses.

Curiously, about the same time that the Botai Culture was rounding up and calming down wild horses, archaeologists now believe, people in east central Europe may have been milking cows. This latest research suggests that our DNA mutated to tolerate bovine milk several thousand years earlier than previously believed.

Cheese and other processed milk products don’t require that lactose tolerance (supposedly, although lactose-intolerant people don’t seem to handle pizza too well). If ancient people were able to tolerate cheese better than milk, is it possible they deliberately experimented with horse and cow milk to try to devise ways of feeding off them?

Cheese can be an important food but to benefit from cheese people have to be able to make it and tolerate it.

The idea that cheese-making might be the result of deliberate experimentation may or may not strike you as unconvincing. It used to be we did not think of our ancestors as possessing scientific knowledge or practicing the scientific method. And yet, other recent discoveries tell us that the ancients fabricated antibiotics. They didn’t have microscopes and they didn’t know about microbes but they undoubtedly developed a repetoire of treatments for illnesses that in some cases are still used today.

So it makes sense that cheese might be the product of ancient science. We should give our ancestors a little credit for being more creative than we have previously assumed they were.

Of course, they didn’t invent white cheese dip but we deserve a little credit for modern ingenuity, too.