years later. Other studies have found
evidence for cheesemaking in Poland
and Switzerland that predates that
of the Croatian sites by a few hun-
dred years, and McClure expects that
traces of the food will turn up at earlier
sites in the Mediterranean and else-
where if researchers use techniques
similar to those of the current study.
The team also found traces of fresh
milk on sherds dating from even ear-
lier than the rhyta, around 5,700 BCE.
The findings add to growing evidence
that humans began using animals for
dairy early in their domestication his-
tory, notes archaeologist Peter Rowley-
Conwy of Durham University in the UK
who was not involved in the work. “It’s
not many years ago... that we thought
that milking and dairying was a pretty
late phenomenon,” he says—archaeolo-
gists assumed animals such as cows and
goats were mainly used for meat early in
their domestication history.Rowley-Conwy suggests it would have
been more beneficial to use animals pri-
marily for dairy. “If you kill one cow, you eat
meat for about a week until it goes off ”—
and you’re left with fewer cows, he says. But
by milking the animals, the farmer would
be “spreading the food gain from that ani-
mal over several months rather than just
one week.” Like meat, though, fresh milk
couldn’t be kept for long without going bad.
Cheese, on the other hand, could be stored
for months at a time, providing much-
needed calories to early farmers between
harvests, Rowley-Conwy says.
McClure notes that the pottery from
the Croatian sites predates the spread
of a human gene mutation across that
corner of Europe that enables people to
digest the milk sugar lactose in adult-
hood. Fermenting milk into yogurt-
like products or making cheese would
have broken down much of the lactose,
allowing adults without the mutation to
eat the foods, she says. In the hundredsof years that humans were milking
domestic animals before the beginnings
of cheesemaking, she and her coauthors
suggest, children were the ones con-
suming milk.
That different types of pottery were
used for different foods reveals a high
level of sophistication on the part of
the Neolithic farmers, Rowley-Conwy
tells The Scientist. Archaeologist Mark
Pearce of the University of Nottingham,
who was not involved in the study, notes
that, in contrast to the sieves, which
have a clear practical purpose, the rhy-
ta’s shape has no clear advantage for
cheesemaking or storage, so it likely
had symbolic significance. “What these
rhyta were used for has always been a
question, so the discovery that they’re
associated with cheese is quite inter-
esting,” he says. “I think that it tells us,
if they’re in a special vessel, [cheeses]
must have a certain importance.”
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