Scientists have made sourdough bread from a yeast found within the stomach of a 5,000-year-old frozen mummy.
Named Oetzi the Iceman, the mummy was killed with an arrow while venturing through the Alps bordering what is now Austria and Italy some 5,300 years ago. In 1991, two German hikers discovered his remains, and scientists have kept his body frozen ever since, which led to some surprising discoveries of ancient and modern microbial life inside his stomach.
“What we didn’t expect to find was yeast,” lead study author Mohamed Sarhan of the Eurac Research institute told Reuters.
“His body hosts living, metabolically capable organisms that are actively responding to their environment,” Sarhan added. “The cold-adapted yeasts are growing. Certain bacteria have colonized and persisted across his tissues for decades. The mummy is, in a very real sense, a living biological interface — a meeting point between the ancient world and the present, where microbes from 5,000 years ago coexist with organisms that arrived last decade.”
Four different yeasts were discovered in the mummy’s guts, skin, and even some “brownish” water that melted off his body – yeasts that survive in cold conditions like Antartica. The yeasts likely entered his body soon after death.
“These yeasts have accompanied Oetzi on his long journey through the millennia,” study co-author Frank Maixner said in a statement.
Scientists kept the gut yeast in a fridge and then did what anyone else would do: use it to make sourdough bread. Though it failed at first, three months later, Sahran said they produced “a very, very good sourdough.” They are now actively considering using it in the brewing of beer.
According to CBS News, the yeast may also contain some practical uses in medical sciences.
“When the mummy was found in 1991, it was initially treated as a normal cadaver. A chemical called phenol was used to stop fungus from growing in the body,” it noted. “However the strange yeast was able to eat the phenol, meaning that in the future it could help break down the chemical in contaminated environments, the scientists said.”