The oldest surviving cheese was found on mummies in the Taklamakan Desert and is about 3,600 years old. Cheese-making is older still: clay strainers with milk-fat residues from Poland date to about 5500 BC.
More amazing facts
- 7000 BC Some flutes about 9,000 years old can still be played.
- 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
- 4700 BC · 2670 BC Popcorn is about 6,700 years old. The earliest popping-corn cobs, from around 4700 BC, were found on the northern coast of Peru, two thousand years before Egypt's first pyramid.
- 4600 BC · 3000 BC Australia's Aboriginal eel traps are older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.
- 4500 BC · 2560 BC The world's oldest gold treasure is nearly 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramid.
- 4100 BC · 2560 BC The oldest known winery is some 1,500 years older than the Great Pyramid.