Ancient faeces shed new light on human cheese habits

An analysis of ancient excrement has revealed that workers at a salt mine in Austria were gorging on beer and blue cheese 2,700 years ago.

The finding was the earliest evidence to date of cheese ripening in Europe, according to researchers

Frank Maixner, a microbiologist at the Eurac Research Institute in Bolzano, Italy, who was the lead author of the report, said he was surprised to learn salt miners more than two millennia ago were advanced enough to “use fermentation intentionally”.