A 10,000-year-old archaeological site in central Turkey offers a glimpse into daily life at the dawn of the agricultural age, including what ancient people ate—and how they made yogurt.
By analyzing proteins left on pottery shards found at the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, researchers discovered that Neolithic people were making and eating yogurt—or something like it—at least 8,000 years ago. It wasn’t exactly the thick, tangy yogurt of today but an ancient precursor.
Not only is Turkey a prime candidate for the birthplace of yogurt, but evidence suggests the world’s oldest yogurt recipe may have included a surprising ingredient: ants.
Ants and Yogurt Go Way Back
According to Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova, a doctoral candidate at the University of Munich, yogurt is a perfect example of an interspecies collaboration in which humans rely on the work of other organisms. Microbes pre-digest the lactose in milk and turn it into lactic acid, giving yogurt its tangy flavor. In 1905, a Bulgarian doctor named Stamen Grigorov was the first to isolate the bacteria responsible for yogurt fermentation. Since he found it in a sample of Bulgarian yogurt, he called it Lactobacillus bulgaricus.
Bulgaria, like neighboring Turkey, has a long history of yogurt making. Sirakova, who grew up in a small mountain village in Bulgaria, remembers her grandmother and other village elders talking about one traditional type of yogurt.
“My grandma mentioned that during her childhood they were using ant colonies to make yogurt,” says Sirakova.
Yes, ant yogurt. According to Sirakova’s grandmother, they would take fresh warm milk, pour it in a bowl or jar, and bury it in the loose soil of an anthill. When dug up the next day, the milk would be slightly curdled and separated, a sign that bacteria were doing their job.
When Sirakova started researching old ethnographic reports, she found that the association between ants and yogurt extended far beyond her small village.
In Turkey, for example, ants were mentioned in early 20th-century accounts of nomadic life. “If the nomads want to make yogurt and cannot find enough starter culture to make yogurt, they crush the tiny eggs of the ants sheltering under the stones in their palms,” read one report. “When you put this into the milk […], that milk becomes yogurt.”
Hidden World of Food Preservation
Crushed ant eggs may seem like an unexpected and unappetizing addition to yogurt, but Sirakova says practices like these made sense to ancestors who lacked refrigeration.
“Milk is such a perishable food, so you must do something to preserve it,” she says. “People were probably more intelligent than us in many ways, observing the environment and using all possibilities to collaborate with what was around them.”
In some parts of Turkey, people used to stir pinecones into milk to encourage fermentation. Other yogurt-making recipes called for the addition of chamomile flowers or crushed nettle roots. But those are all plants. How did people make the leap to ants?
“The more we've looked at fermentation around the world, the more we see that people are just doing wildly different things that are way cooler and weirder and richer than we tend to think,” says Rob Dunn, a scientist at North Carolina State University who studies fermented foods including wild sourdough. “I think there's this hidden world of people figuring out how to rely on the species around them and co-opting their relationships.”
How Ants Make Yogurt
Dunn and Sirakova were both contributors to a 2025 paper exploring the biological mechanisms behind ant yogurt. The study found that ant colonies host specific bacteria and enzymes that fuel the fermentation process.
In Bulgaria, the red wood ant is the native species used to make ant yogurt. Red wood ants build colonies—or “nests”—out of thatched mounds of soil and plant material. Researchers found that both the ants and their nest materials were home to a wide diversity of microorganisms, including Lactobacillus bulgaricus, the most common bacteria in yogurt, and Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis, the bacteria responsible for sourdough bread.
Those beneficial bacteria come directly from the ants’ mouths.
“Ants have these little pockets in their mouths that they use to pre-digest their food,” says Dunn. “It's like they have a little fermentation that happens in their mouths before things go into their GI.”
As part of the research, Sirakova returned to her Bulgarian village to test traditional yogurt-making methods. She buried jars of milk in anthills, as her grandmother instructed, and also tried adding live ants directly to the milk. Both experiments produced a thin, mildly flavored yogurt that was “definitely fermented,” she says. Burying the milk in the ant colony offered an added advantage: the heat from the nest’s constant activity sped fermentation.
