Quoting Roswitha: Anyone with any type of interest in yoghurt should hie themselves over to the Saudi Aramco World web page to read the wonderful article entitled Of Yogurt and Yörüks. Yörüks are a nomadic Turkish people. It is a nice look at how yoghurt is made, as well as different types of yoghurt products (including butter and cheese and drinks.)
It is more generally accepted by food historians that sometime around 5000 BC, nomadic pastoralists living in Central Asia discovered goat’s-milk yogurt and the technique of making it on purpose from a starter culture. This was an extremely important nutritional event, because in hot climates, long before the development of modern refrigeration or the invention of pasteurization, milk went bad within hours or days. Freshly made cultured yogurt contains up to a billion live cells per milliliter of L. bulgaricus and S. thermophilus, and this huge concentration discourages the growth of other, possibly disease-causing, bacteria at the same time that fermentation helps preserve the milk and improves its digestibility by breaking down the lactose. For millennia, making yogurt was the only known method of safely preserving milk without drying it.
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200804/of.yogurt.and.yoruks.htm
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