Have you ever wondered what sourdough bread made with yeast collected from the remains of a man who died thousands of years ago tastes like? Probably not. Well, we hope so. Fortunately, scientists are there to answer questions that we don’t even dare to imagine.
Let’s go back a little bit. In September 1991, German hikers discovered by chance, while walking through the Italian Alps, the remains of a man, naturally mummified in the ice. This man is Ötzi: he was around 1.60 meters tall and around forty years old when he was probably murdered there, at the top of the mountain… 5,300 years ago!
The story could have ended there, and it would have already been spectacular. This was without counting on scientists, for whom this natural mummy is a leap into the past incredibly rich in information. An open book, an important chapter of which is in his stomach.
In addition to determining what Ötzi ate before he died (ibex, a bit of deer, and wheat, for those curious), research had already shown that his oral and gut microbiome was still teeming with gut microbes found in today’s non-Westernized communities, like the Hazda hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, reports Live Science. A new study, published June 3 in the journal Microbiome, shows that spores are even still active!
Mo-crumb of bread
From taking samples of Ötzi’s internal and external microbiome, but also from his environment, the scientists found yeasts still active, which would have infiltrated his remains shortly after his death. The presence of traces of ancient DNA alterations in these yeasts suggests that they remained dormant for 5,300 years. One of them, originating from glaciers and called Glaciozyma, ended up becoming dominant over the years, proliferating slowly but surely.
These yeasts would therefore have continued to colonize the mummified remains for millennia. And what do you do when you find yeast on a Copper Age mummy? We cultivate them, of course! This is the little mess the research team got into. The researchers finally managed to cultivate four yeasts from Ötzi samples, ideal for… making good bread.
Some of these yeasts could be ideally suited to making sourdough bread, the study concludes. Preliminary tests have already been carried out and “it worked”said Mohamed Sarhan, one of the study’s authors and a microbiologist at the Eurac Mummy Research Institute in Italy. “The dough was really excellent.” To the point that these yeasts could one day be used by fermentation industries, for example for the manufacture of bread or beer, imagines the scientist.
In the meantime, using Ötzi’s yeasts has not been without problems. Modern microbes may have accidentally been deposited on the iceman during conservation operations. We do not yet know if these will harm the remains… or if they will, in turn, end up in sourdough bread in a few thousand years.
