SEE CAPTION FOR MORE INFORMATION / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO / D. Brandner / Museum of Natural History of Vienna" - NO MARKETING - NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS
This undated image courtesy of the Museum of Natural History of Vienna (NHMW), Archaeologists work in one of the Iron Age mining areas inside the Hallstatt salt mountain. - The human love of cheese and beer goes back a long way. Workers at a salt mine in Austria were already producing blue cheese and beer in sophisticated ways about 2,700 years ago, according to a new study that found evidence of this...in feces. Scientists made the discovery by analyzing samples of human excrement found in the heart of the Hallstatt mine in the Austrian Alps. Their results were published on October 13, 2021, in the journal Current Biology. The miners "were quite sophisticated to use fermentation intentionally, which surprised me a lot," Frank Maixner, a microbiologist at the Eurac Research Institute in Bolzano, Italy, and lead author of the study, told AFP. (Photo by D. Brandner / Museum of Natural History of Vienna / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO / D. Brandner / Museum of Natural History of Vienna" - NO MARKETING - NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS / TO GO WITH AFP STORY "Living on beer and cheese, 2,700 years ago"