This Sourdough Starter Is 5,300 Years Old — And It Came From A Mummy’s Gut

A team of scientists in Italy is breaking the mold of a typical sourdough bread recipe … by using yeast from an ancient mummy as the key ingredient.

And apparently it’s “very, very good.”

Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old Iceman mummy, was found in 1991 on the border of Italy and Austria, where he was likely killed by an arrow to the shoulder. His body was famously preserved in the glacial ice of the Ötztal Alps, becoming Europe’s oldest natural mummy. 

A new study of the Iceman mummy, published Wednesday in the journal Microbiome, reveals groundbreaking insights into the surprisingly active gut microbiome of the ancient mummy.

Most notable was the living yeast discovered in the mummy’s guts, skin, and a “brownish” water. So the next step, naturally, was to make bread.

“What we didn’t expect to find was yeast,” the lead author of the study, Mohamed Sarhan, told AFP. “If you tell anyone you have yeast, they immediately ask: Can we use it for bread?”

The task resulted in three months of trial and error, but the researchers eventually created a loaf they called “very, very good.”

“At first, the yeast hadn’t yet adapted to the flour environment, so nothing happened at all. We then continued over a longer period and refreshed it about every two weeks so that the yeast could slowly adapt. Eventually, we obtained a completely normal dough that rose within 24 hours — basically just like with ordinary yeast,” he said in a statement.

The scientific accomplishment is just the beginning. Sarhan told Reuters the study shows the Iceman mummy as a “dynamic ecosystem” and there’s still much left to learn.

“His body hosts living, metabolically capable organisms that are ⁠actively responding to their environment,” Sarhan said. “The cold-adapted yeasts are growing. Certain bacteria have colonized and persisted across his tissues for decades.”

This isn’t the end of the borderline-cannibalistic endeavor. Get ready to crack open a cold one because mummy yeast beer might be next on the list.