I haven’t worked with any archaeologists, but I have worked with a few geologists, and all of them would bring in their favorite rocks and lick them every once and a while.

removed by mod

If someone digs me up and starts eating my stomach contents after I die I’ll haunt them for eternity

The British conquered so much of the world they had any food they could imagine to eat and they said, “Actually, I want to try cannibalism.”

I doubt it’s being turned into a product per se. This is just a piece of experimental archaeology. Knowing what ancient bread may have tasted like does give us some kind of insight into the deep past (although I’m skeptical of just how much). Not… Entirely sure how I feel about it, personally.

While I can see how the similarity to wealthy Europeans eating bits of Egyptian mummies makes people uncomfortable, it’s a pretty superficial similarity. They didn’t just scoop bits of Ötzi out and use it to leaven bread, there’s a whole microbiome on Ötzi that would make that unsafe. They cultured specific yeasts, and grew fresh samples. Ötzi’s still in the general area where he lived, he was found in the alps and his remains are in Italy. His discovery and recovery were to my knowledge celebrated at the time, including in his homeland, and have continued to be celebrated. His remains weren’t stolen.

This is very, very different from stealing Egyptian mummies from a colonised Egypt, without the consent of the Egyptian people, shipping them halfway around the world, and grinding them up to eat, because you guess that the remains of the mystical, exotic people probably have magic properties.

I wouldn’t assume it to be intended to sell. Part of the yeast being out of circulation for so long means it’s different from any yeasts in the world right now, by nature of not being subject to background mutation and evolving alongside us.

How well does it consume modern sugars compared to modern yeast strains? How does it handle the process of baking sourdough as we know it?

Multiple bits of useful information to be gleaned. How do it’s genotypical differences from modern strains actually impact it’s physical reality? Useful correlation to modern yeast as one maps it’s genome. If it doesn’t react the same way, can you alter the process to make something that still works? If not, did ancient bread just kinda suck? If so, did ancient people have that different process? Regardless of yes or no, then we might get a better lens through which to analyze our current understandings.

If it did have a different set of requirements for baking, one can suspect those same genetic variations may serve as levers by which evolution might impact modern strains. Given our rapidly changing climate, understanding how alterations to yeasts genome impact it is again, potentially very useful even if only as a reference.

Beyond what we can glean about it this particular strain, why not? Worst case, taste tester dies, as they feared recreated mammoth meat might trigger an allergic reaction to something humanity haven’t been exposed to recently. I doubt they did this for free with random volunteers signing wavers. I’d suspect it was a very informed research member trying it after proposing the idea.

Not sure if you know many scientists. This isn’t even top 10 on the “of course you tried that” list. Being passionate about learning new things and trying new things with what you’ve just learned is super common. Know how many Conservation and Wildlife folk I know have tried the local fauna as roadkill? Right of passage for local branch of the State Conservation team. BBQ raccoon isn’t half bad. How many in Plant Science grow illegal or poisonous flora because “just look at this cute lil guy” How many engineers I know will use home projects based on their skill set to do something wildly overkill because “I bet that’d work and I already have the laser”

okay

I personally don’t care if someone eats me.

In fact, I preemptively consent to let any fellow Hexbears to dig in if we ever get stranded on an island or something.

that guy 8000 years ago was eating that bread when it was fresh

In this specific case, the yeasts were discovered while partially thawing the mummy to take tissue samples. It took over three months of cultivating to arrive at something that could actually be used to make sourdough, so these are not yeast bacteria that have ever actually been in Ötzi’s gut themselves. Still feels weird, but i’d say it’s not quite in the same ballpark as British colonizers grinding Egyptian mummies into powder to ingest them as “medicine”.