In a basement in Frederiksberg, Denmark, two bottles had been collecting dust for over a century. Last year, in a stroke of luck, researchers from the University of Copenhagen stumbled upon them once more, and found a suspect white powder lurking within. This residue, they would go on to uncover, contained bacteria from the 1890s and had once-upon-a-time been used to make butter, thus opening up a window into the Scandinavian country’s dairy-making past. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

“It was like opening a kind of microbiological relic. The fact that we were able to extract genetic information from bacteria used in Danish butter production 130 years ago was far more than we had dared to hope for,” Jørgen Leisner, aut

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