Cheese
Perforated pottery sieves in Poland carry milk fat residue from 5500 BCE.
- When
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Fragments of pierced ceramic strainers from Kuyavia, analysed for lipid residues, show they were used to separate curds from whey around 5500 BCE. The finding matters because almost nobody at that date could digest lactose: cheesemaking removes most of it, which made milk usable by adults thousands of years before the genetic adaptation appeared. It is a technological workaround preceding a biological one.