Way back in 1991, two German hikers stumbled across the body of a man in the Alps lying facedown. Little did they know, the body had been in that spot for over 5,000 years.
Ötzi the Iceman is the best-preserved human body from that era ever discovered, and you can imagine how excited scientists were to get their hands on his corpse.
Partly to study and gain insights into human history, but mostly to bake fresh sourdough bread out of the yeast in his guts.
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At least that was the goal of professors Mohamed Sarhan and Frank Maixner of the Eurac Research Institute in the Italian city of Bolzano.
CBS News reports,
‘His body hosts living, metabolically capable organisms that are actively responding to their environment,' Sarhan told the Reuters news agency. ‘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.'
‘If you tell anyone you have yeast, they immediately ask: can we use it for bread?' Sarhan said.
And it turns out the answer to that is, yes.
Which is arguably not the same answer you would get from the question: should you make bread from the yeast found in a dead man's stomach?
After three months of effort ‘we had a very, very good sourdough,' Sarhan said with a laugh.
Believe it or not, the sourdough isn't even the weirdest part of the story.
When the mummy was found in 1991, they coated it in phenol to keep fungus from growing on it.
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.
The yeast ate the toxic phenol?
And yet, the scientists still ate the dead mummy bread?
Next up, the team plans on using their monster yeast to make dead mummy beer.
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