imagined, there would be a novel strain or
some combination of microbes Mongolians
were using to process milk in a way that
Western science had missed.
So far, she’s found Enterococcus, a
bacterium common in the human gut
that excels at digesting lactose but was
eliminated from US and European dairy
commodities decades ago. And they’ve
spotted some new strains of familiar bac-
teria like Lactobacillus. But they haven’t
identified any radically different species or
starters—no magic microbes ready to pack-
age in pill form. “It doesn’t seem like there
is a range of superbugs in there,” says Max
Planck anthropologist Matthäus Rest, who
works with Warinner on dairy research.
The reality might be more daunting.
Rather than a previously undiscovered
strain of microbes, it might be a complex web
of organisms and practices—the lovingly
maintained starters, the milk-soaked felt of
the yurts, the gut flora of individual herders,
the way they stir their barrels of airag—
that makes the Mongolian love affair with so
many dairy products possible.Warinner’s proj-
ect now has a
new name, Dairy
Cultures, reflect-
ing her growing
realization that
Mongolia’s micro-
bial toolkit might
not come down to a few specific bacteria.
“Science is often very reductive,” she says.
“People tend to look at just one aspect of
things. But if we want to understand dairy-
ing, we can’t just look at the animals, or the
microbiome, or the products. We have to
look at the entire system.”
The results could help explain another
phenomenon, one that affects people far
from the Mongolian steppes. The billionsrennet— an enzyme from the stom-
achs of calves—to get the right
texture and taste. Mongolians,
on the other hand, maintain mi-
crobial cultures called starters,
saving a little from each batch to
inoculate the next.
Ethnographic evidence suggests that these prepa-
rations have been around a very, very long time. In
Mongolian, they’re called khöröngö, a word that’s de-
rived from the term for wealth or inheritance. They
are living heirlooms, typically passed from mother
to daughter. And they require regular care and
feeding. “Starter cultures get constant attention
over weeks, months, years, generations,” says Björn
Reichhardt, a Mongolian- speaking ethnographer
at Max Planck and member of Warinner’s team re-
sponsible for collecting most of the samples in the
Jena freezers. “Mongolians tend to dairy products
the way they would an infant.” As with a child, the
environment in which they’re nurtured is deeply
influential. The microbial makeup of each family’s
starters seems to be subtly different.
After returning from Khatgal in 2017, Warinner
launched the Heirloom Microbe project to iden-
tify and catalog the bacteria the herders were
using to make their dairy products. The name re-
flected her hope that the yurts harbored strains or
species ignored by industrial labs and corporate
starter- culture manufacturers. Perhaps, WarinnerAncient
plaque shows
Mongolians
have eaten
dairy for
millennia.COURTESYCHRISTINAWARINNERPOPSCI.COM
PAGE 52W