Milk fat on 7,000-year old pieces of pottery from Northern
Europe provide the earliest evidence that prehistoric people
knew how to process perishable milk into transportable and
longer-lasting cheese. Milk residue has been found in pots from
Libya nearly 7,000 years old and on 8,000-year old pots from
Northwestern Anatolia, a region that roughly corresponds to
modern-day Turkey. That provided evidence that people in those
areas used milk, but it wasn’t clear if they processed it into
cheese by separating the milk proteins and fat from the liquid.
Some prehistoric vessels, however, resemble modern cheesemaking
equipment. Thirty years ago, archeologists proposed that sieve-
like pots were used to separate the chunky curds from the liquid
whey. Those curds could then be worked into cheese. But others
thought these sieves may have been used for beer making or to
strain honey. Now Mélanie Salque, of the University of Bristol,
and colleagues have identified milk fat on sherds of prehistoric
sieve-like bowls from Po