Prerequisites for the Discovery of Cheesemaking

 

My goal for this post is to examine the somewhat enigmatic questions of how, where, when, and why did cheesemaking arise for the very first time. So let’s start at the beginning. One of the first questions that we must address is: Did cheesemaking have a single birthplace, from which it then spread out in all four directions, or, did cheesemaking originate in more than one place, and at more than one time?  The more I investigated the evidential base, the stronger became the argument that there was indeed one primary point of origin in the Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia at the start of the Neolithic Age around 10,000 years ago. This means that wherever one finds cheesemaking taking place today, virtually anywhere on the planet, one can theoretically reconstruct a direct lineage that stretches all the way back to that single point of origin. Cheesemaking is a story that, arguably, links the entire globe together.

This of course raises the question, why the Fertile Crescent, and why 10,000 years ago? Why not somewhere else around the same time, or at a different time, and how do we make sense out of this story? Well, my approach to any question pertaining to cheese history is to always look at the transdisciplinary evidential base through the lens of dairy and cheese science, and cheese technology, and the life of the cheese maker. The rationale for this approach is that every cheesemaker, irrespective of place and time, or technology, or even scale of production for that matter, faces a common set of requirements that must be satisfied for cheesemaking to take place. If these prerequisites are not satisfied, there will be no cheesemaking in that region until they are satisfied.

Now let me be clear about this; to reconstruct the full story of cheesemaking, one needs to look at cheese history from a wide range of trans-disciplinary perspectives. My cheese science perspective is not the full story by any means, but it is a necessary component of the story. Therefore, applying this train of thinking, I hypothesize that there were at least six essential prerequisites that needed to be satisfied before cheesemaking could have been brought into practice for the first time long ago in a particular region, five of which are based strictly on considerations of dairy and cheese science, as well as cheesemaking practicality, whereas the sixth is based on archaeoanthropology.

So let’s take a look these six proposed prerequisites. The first prerequisite is that the region under consideration must have afforded human communities there with direct access to gregarious and human friendly mammals that were amenable to being milked by humans. In other words, there must have been mammals in the neighborhood that tended to live out their lives in groups, not as lone rangers, so they could be herded in groups. These mammals also needed to be relatively comfortable around humans, for human communities to then take these mammals into captivity, begin to herd them, and eventually to domesticate them.

Domestication means to subject the animals to genetic selection on a desirable trait, to make them less wild and more valuable to humans. Genetic selection, in turn, requires the manipulation of the animal’s breeding cycle, which in turn, would have required Neolithic herders to oversee the conception, the birthing, the suckling, and the weaning processes of their animals in captivity. Now presumably, this must have, in turn, focused the attention of these herders on human milk production, because human babies also go through the process of conception, birthing, suckling, and weaning. Therefore, it seems plausible that these Neolithic herders, who were in the process of domesticating their livestock, were then able to make the quantum leap needed to envision that their lactating animals might be able to serve as a source of milk to supplement mom’s milk in the feeding of her toddler, who was not quite yet ready to be weaned. So the bottom line is, that the domestication of gregarious, human-friendly mammals opened the door to the origin of dairying, which then, opened the door to cheesemaking for the first time.

However, the herding and domestication of mammals, while opening the door, was not sufficient to then give rise to dairying and cheesemaking in actual practice. Why? Because different mammalian species produce dramatically different volumes of milk. For example, some mammals produce very concentrated milk in very small volumes, others produce less concentrated milk but in much greater volumes. Therefore, the specific mammals that were taken into captivity and domesticated by Neolithic communities in the region of interest must also have produced large enough volumes of milk to render the harvesting of that milk practical and worthwhile. Furthermore, the volumes harvested needed to be large enough to make cheesemaking feasible as a subsistence strategy.

It tuns out that not all domesticated mammals produce such large volumes of milk. For example, we know that in some regions of the globe, mammalian species were brought into captivity and domesticated early in the Neolithic, but those species produced less than an ounce of milk per milking on average. Now, it seems unlikely that less than an ounce of milk per milking, or less than 2 ounces per day, would be sufficiently attractive to incentivize those Neolithic herders to implement and perfect all that it would be needed to harvest this tiny amount of milk from each animal, and then pool the milk from the many animals that would be necessary to accumulate enough milk to make cheesemaking practical. It doesn’t make sense as a subsistence strategy worth pursuing.

So I would argue that these Neolithic communities, even though they were actively domesticating locally accessible human-friendly mammals, were not likely candidates for developing dairying and then cheesemaking for the first time, and indeed we know of cases where they didn’t develop dairying and cheesemaking independently. For example, when the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they must have been perplexed to find the existence of great civilizations with sophisticated agricultural systems, yet a complete absence of dairying and cheesemaking, even though all along the spine of the Andes Mountains in South America indigenous mammals had long been domesticated, which gave rise to the modern Llama and Alpaca species.

These mammals were revered for their magnificent fleece and fiber, as well as their capacity as pack animals, their resilience in high altitude and very dry environments, and their very gentle environmental footprint. Yet there is no evidence that these mammals were ever domesticated for dairying. Why? Well, presumably because Llamas and Alpacas produce very small volumes of quite concentrated milk...less that an ounce of milk per milking, which must have been a major stumbling block for Neolithic herders to contemplate and experiment with dairying and cheesemaking.

But beyond having access to gregarious human-friendly mammals that can be herded and domesticated, and which produce adequate volumes of milk, a further prerequisite is that the milk from those animals must also have had a suitable chemistry that enabled the milk to coagulate in the peculiar manner that that allows whey to readily separate from curds. Not all mammals produce milk that coagulates in this manner, therefore, cheesemaking will not occur unless the milk possesses the necessary chemistry to coagulate, because coagulation is the irreplaceable first step in cheesemaking, and if coagulation fails to take place, there is no cheese! It’s as simple as that.

Indeed, there are examples of communities that domesticated mammals, and harvested milk from those mammals, even though the milk was unable to coagulate. In these cases, the milk was used for purposes other than cheesemaking, such as for the feeding their unweaned toddlers, or even to produce other dairy products. For example, several millennia ago, the harvesting of horse milk on the Eurasian steppe gave rise to the production of the beloved alcoholic beverage Koumiss, but horse milk was never used for cheesemaking  because it does not coagulate properly for that purpose.  

My fourth proposed prerequisite has to do with the ambient temperature conditions that were necessary for milk that had been harvested to coagulate rapidly and spontaneously. Neolithic communities had to be able to observe the spontaneous coagulation of milk, in order to make the connection that the resulting curds were desirable and valuable to the community as a food resource, and to make the connection that they can gain control over the process of coagulation, and turn this magical phenomenon into a predictable component of their subsistence strategy. They had to first witness coagulation in action to make these connections.

Now, for milk to coagulate spontaneously, through the accumulation of lactic acid produced by lactic acid bacteria, or for that matter, through the action of rennet enzymes, either way, the milk must be above at least 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and more realistically above 80 degrees for rapid spontaneous coagulation. Below 80 degrees, milk simply will not coagulate, or it will take many hours to coagulate. Therefore, Neolithic communities that made the quantum leap to harvest milk from their domesticated mammals needed to be living in a warm ambient environment that would enable lactic acid bacteria naturally present in the harvested milk to quickly reach a sufficiently high population density, to produce enough lactic acid, to spontaneously coagulate the milk before the milk was used for its intended purpose.

Therefore, the bottom line is that a warm ambient environment was essential to create lactic acid bacterial communities that became associated with human communities through biofilm formation on various milk contact surfaces used during milk harvesting activities (e.g., wooden or animal skin milk storage vessels) . These reservoirs of lactic acid bacteria, which then sloughed off the biofilms and inoculated newly harvested batches of milk, enabled the spontaneous coagulation of milk to take place under warm ambient temperatures, and to become a regularly observed phenomena within these Neolithic communities. This in turn soon gave rise to the first efforts to control this coagulation phenomenon, which ultimately enabled the controlled production cheese curd and in turn enabled the community to make the connection that cheese curd could become a vital supplement to their existing subsistence strategy.

Probably a good example of where milking was long practiced by communities, but which never led to cheesemaking because the environment was too cold, are the reindeer herders of the arctic tundra. Although they had milked reindeer for several millennia, these herders did not begin to practice cheesemaking until very recently. It seems likely that the knowledge of coagulation and the critical role that warm temperature plays in the process of coagulation, were unknown to these herders and/or not considered a practical component of their subsistence strategy. Reindeer milk cheese, by the way, is quite nice, but it was not the reindeer herders of the arctic tundra who discovered and perfected the technology. They had to acquire that knowledge from elsewhere.

Moving on now, my fifth proposed prerequisite is based on practical considerations relating to the life of the cheese maker. The rationale here is that even if the first four prerequisites were satisfied in a particular place at a particular time and, therefore, the discovery of dairying and cheesemaking were theoretically possible and even feasible, the Neolithic herders in that region might very well lack the incentive to explore the opportunities afforded by dairying and cheesemaking if that community already possessed a very successful and secure subsistence strategy that offered robust food security.  In other words, I would argue that dairying and cheesemaking would likely only have arisen among communities that were living in an environment that carried a high enough risk to survival to make all the work involved in dairying and cheesemaking an attractive value proposition as a subsistence strategy for the community. In contrast, regions of the globe during the Neolithic that consisted of agriculturally lush environments that provided a high degree of food security through crop cultivation were not strong candidates for the origin of dairying and cheesemaking.

A good example of this, I believe, is the eastern region of China. This was one of the earliest birthplaces for agriculture during the Neolithic. And it is a very fertile agricultural region, which gave rise to one of humanity’s earliest great civilizations, yet communities in eastern China never pursued dairying and cheesemaking, even though they could have. Indeed, the archaeological record indicates that water buffalo and hump-backed cattle were domesticated in this region of China early on, and these domesticated mammals were good candidates for dairying purposes and ultimately for cheesemaking.

So why didn’t dairying and cheesemaking arise independently in China? The preponderance of evidence suggests that during the Neolithic, from the beginning, dairying and cheesemaking were adopted in regions where they served as essential supplements to an insecure crop production capability. They basically served as an insurance policy in agriculturally fragile environments that were vulnerable to crop failure due to a variety of reasons, such as climatic fluxes and environmental degradation. Therefore, communities that chose to take on all the effort needed to develop dairying and cheesemaking for the first time did so because they basically had to, to mitigate the significant risk that over-reliance upon crop production posed to their survival.

In contrast, Neolithic eastern China enjoyed a remarkable degree of food security through crop production, and eventually the domestication of poultry and swine. Therefore, even though they had access to domesticated cattle and water buffalo that produced enough milk with the correct chemistry to render cheesemaking possible, that possibility was never pursued because it wasn’t needed, thank you very much. Consequently, China developed a very rich and deeply embedded food culture that has been remarkably resistant to dairy and cheese right up until the 20th century. It’s an amazing story of gastronomic conservatism.

Well that then brings me to my last prerequisite, which concerns the development of a spiritual acuity that supported complex imaginative capabilities. This is an intriguing train of archaeo-anthropological thinking, that posits that a spiritually facilitated imagination was necessary for humanity to make the quantum leap, to make all the connections needed, to progress from the Paleolithic hunter-forager Age to the Neolithic Age and the agricultural revolution. And by extension, this spiritually facilitated imagination underpinned the Neolithic pursuit of mammalian domestication, and milk harvesting, and ultimately cheesemaking.

Now, this is a complex prerequisite to unpack, but basically it is founded upon archaeological evidence that Paleolithic hunter-foragers underwent an extraordinary leap in imaginative capacity and spiritual acuity immediately before the onset of the Neolithic Age. These startling advances in cognitive ability, then triggered the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic revolution.The Neolithic, in turn, gave rise to communities that were sedentary, and this new sedentary cultural context then began to unleash the potential of this latent cognitive ability, which up to this point had been restrained within the Paleolithic hunter-forager cultural context, but now, this side of the Neolithic, became a force that was virtually unstoppable.

One of the cultural repercussions of this quantum leap in spiritual acuity was a strong communal projection of the sacred and the spiritual onto milk, and cheese, and butter such that these dairy products became a permanent element of community worship and spiritual expression, even as dairying and cheesemaking subsequently spread across continents. Therefore, cheese and spirituality were linked at the hip, so to speak, from the beginning, and they remained linked at the hip for millennia thereafter, indeed even to this day in many cases across the globe.

In summary then, I would argue that cheesemaking was not an inevitable eventuality for the human species. Indeed, multiple complex factors had to be in place simultaneously in a particular region, at a particular time, for the harvesting of milk to become an element of the community subsistence strategy, and then for cheesemaking to emerge once the dairying community had become established. Now again, it goes without saying there were other critical conditions that also needed to be satisfied to explain the origin of cheesemaking. But I have found that these six prerequisites provide an insightful set of lenses with which to evaluate the transdisciplinary trains of evidence that one must make sense of, in order to reconstruct cheese history.

In the next installment of Cheese, Culture and Beyond, we will explore how all six of my proposed prerequisites were satisfied in the Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia starting around 11,000 years ago. Indeed, it was the perfect storm of conditions for the herding and domestication of mammals with the necessary characteristics, and for dairying and cheesemaking to then arise in rapid succession starting around 10,000 years ago (8000 BC), resulting in a sedentary mixed agricultural subsistence strategy that changed the world and much of humanity from that point forward.