A 6k-year-old fruit fly gave the world modern cheeses and yogurts | Hacker News Reader

A 6k-year-old fruit fly gave the world modern cheeses and yogurts

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108 pointssohkamyung21 comments

A traditional Bulgarian way to make yogurt is to put ants in the milk.

http://www.ayurvedic-recipes.com/prigotvjane-na-kiselo-mljak... One of the last paragraphs.

This means the required bacteria were present in the environment and this process has been repeated intentionally several times.

The article affirmation that it happened once because of a fly and then the new bacterial strain survived seems a bit naive, considering bacteria mix their genes all the time.

>A traditional Bulgarian way to make yogurt is to put ants in the milk.

I wonder of the formic acid in ants has anything to do with helping the curdling process. Ants have fairly acidic bodies, they taste like lemon when you eat them....yes I have eaten ants.

Carpenter ants taste far far far worse than lemon. They taste like burning. As there are over 1,000 species of carpenter ants, I can't tell you specifically which species, but they are the black and brown ones that are common in Maine.

The ones I have eaten taste a mix between popcorn and peanuts.

https://eatyourworld.com/destinations/south_america/colombia...

actually you can put fair amount of anything as probiotic bacteria is so omnipresent around Balkans and Bulgaria in particular, that it’s basically everywhere

It's a nice, even a probable, idea. I suppose it's good enough to try to hook readers in to the actual science. The paper itself has no talk of fruit flies and no support for this claim.

Come on, look at the graphical abstract to the paper. And notice the references to "insect-associated species K. lactis var. drosophilarum"

You're absolutely right. My ctrl-f search for "fly" returned nothing, with javascript off I have no graphics on that page, and reading the introduction and skimming the rest didn't mention them but that's no real excuse. Thanks for the correction.

"The milk-producing animals cow, sheep, and goat were all domesticated between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago [20 ], and paleoproteomic analysis of dental calculus has shown that humans were consuming milk, most likely as cheese or other fermented products, by 5,500 years ago [21 ]. "

I wonder if 500 years is a reasonable rounding error for this time span or just making the headline more reader "friendly".

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...

That 5500 is a terminus ante quem[1], the time before which - not the time at which - humans must have started consuming milk products. I don't know whether the 6000 year number is based on anything, but changing it to 5500 wouldn't make the title any more correct. You'd have to explicitly mention that it was a bound, which is probably a bit much for a headline.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_post_quem

Unless the fruit fly was already 500 years old at the time

But don't we already know it was 6k years old?

Now I am wondering why K. lactis is preferred over K. marxianus, given that the latter was the source of the former's ability to metabolize lactose. The paper mentions a dairy strain of K. marxianus, but does not elaborate.

Reading things like this in a paper about microbes, I wonder: why is the English speaking world so trashy?

...a little bit of illicit sex made all of this possible.

It's not an "English speaking" thing, nor "trashy".

Moreover, that is not a paper; it's a blog article written with, and I quote the website's colophon, "Academic rigour, journalistic flair".

Or "calm down ur tits m8 get laid or smt" as an actually trashy english speaker would say.

Reading this as journalism I still wonder, why is the English speaking world so trashy?

Can you explain what you mean by trashy? Sentences like that barely register to me. Seems odd that to me it caused such a reaction.

The author goes out of their way to mention something off-colour. That's trashy. It doesn't add anything to our understanding of the paper or the topic.

In particular, referring to cross-breeding of related yeasts as "illicit" -- what could be the real purpose here, other than to be off-colourful?

Comes across as dry humour to me, but maybe that is just because I'm British like the Author. Injecting mildly sarcastic or "off-coloured" language into a casual piece of writing is very common. I half get where you're coming from though.

Agreed. The giggling-schoolboy attitude whenever sex is mentioned just has to die.

For some reason your comment reminded me of "No Sex Please - We're British"

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