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Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

sciencemag.org

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Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#31

Post by nkurz »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #15
lordnacho wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so powerful, why did it not take over the rest of the world, or at least the rest of Eurasia? You'd think just a few people having kids with foreign populations would make the gene conquer the whole planet? They had cows in other places as well, right? One guess might be that winters in Europe were harsher than other population centres (China, India, Middle East), and periodic famines meant that some people w…

Uhh, they just drank different milk. Ox milk, goat milk, etc. Cattle are not always found in other places.

You might be thinking of a different animal. An ox isn't a good choice as an milking animal, as it typically is a castrated male bovine. If female, it would at least produce milk, but then it would just be a cow used for plowing, and would have the same milk as a dairy cow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox. Maybe you mean a water buffalo?

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#32

Post by ardit33 »

kristopolous wrote: post #22
jonplackett wrote: post #21

Considering how obsessed we are with giving milk to kids because it’s so healthy, it doesn’t seem that crazy it would be a massive advantage to be able to drink it.

I'm somewhere between 100 and 100% sure that perception was manufactured by dairy industry marketing. It was a classic bernays strategy, create the perception that everyone is doing it than everyone will do it. The same strategy used to get people to both start and stop smoking 60 years later

that's not a correct point of view. Your theory would be valid, if this didn't happen in other european countries that had no marketing whatsoever or 'evil big milk' industry behind....

Almost all former communist countries, gave lots of milk of children, whenever they could as it was universally considered healthy and nutritional.

Also Milk, yogurt and cheese are staples of most Mediterranean diets, since like forever.

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#33

Post by GuB-42 »

pan69 wrote: post #17
AlotOfReading wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lactase persistence isn't the only (or even first) way to convert inedible flora into food. For one, you can simply eat the cows, the way it was done for most of human history. If you absolutely insist on dairy though, the genes for lactase persistence post-date dairying by a few millennia and many people who rely primarily on dairy today still lack the genes, like most Mongolians. They've adapted different productio…

> For one, you can simply eat the cows It could be more resource intensive to get a new cow each time rather than milk the same cow over and over for a longer period of time.

Not denying it but in order for a cow to produce milk, it has to give birth to a calf every year. So you are getting new cows as a byproduct.

Today, male calves are usually separated from their mother early and slaughtered for their meat, while females can be used to replenish stock. But if you prefer you can slaughter them later for more meat and less milk.

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#34

Post by srtjstjsj »

grawprog wrote: post #7
lordnacho wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so powerful, why did it not take over the rest of the world, or at least the rest of Eurasia? You'd think just a few people having kids with foreign populations would make the gene conquer the whole planet? They had cows in other places as well, right? One guess might be that winters in Europe were harsher than other population centres (China, India, Middle East), and periodic famines meant that some people w…

>You hear stories about people trying everything when they're out of food, maybe trying the cow's milk was a sort of last resort that worked for some lucky people. Then again, you'd think they'd have eaten the cow first. Maybe it was more desperation from waiting for cheese or something? I'm guessing if they kept milk cattle and didn't eat it they had a reason? Cheese seems like something that cows would be used for.…

Cheese has about the same lactose as milk, doesn't it?

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#35

Post by ardit33 »

austincheney wrote: post #29

By the time Germans became familiar to the Romans milk consumption was common. The common source of dietary fats for Romans at the time was olive oil. The common source of fats for the Germans was butter which the Romans looked down upon as barbaric.

Greeks did use butter, but not milk.

But Illyrians, (northern neighbors, in modern day Albania) did drink milk. At some point they were invaded/incorporated by the Roman empire, and about 190 B.c. 'drinking milk' was not such a unfathomed thing. (but, albeit, might have been not a 'aristocratic' thing to do).

http://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Docum...

So, romans didn't drink milk originally, but their neighbors across the sea did.

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#36

Post by rwh86 »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #34
grawprog wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You hear stories about people trying everything when they're out of food, maybe trying the cow's milk was a sort of last resort that worked for some lucky people. Then again, you'd think they'd have eaten the cow first. Maybe it was more desperation from waiting for cheese or something? I'm guessing if they kept milk cattle and didn't eat it they had a reason? Cheese seems like something that cows would be used for.…

Cheese has about the same lactose as milk, doesn't it?

Hard cheeses contain almost no lactose; it's consumed by bacteria during the maturation process.

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#37

Post by jodrellblank »

eloff wrote: post #9
seibelj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe school should mostly be help with what is currently deemed “homework” and homework should consist of watching lectures, interesting videos, etc. from the incredible plethora of existing content that is superb. No individual teacher could ever create lessons as good as those (plus it’s exhausting). Teaching is backwards and hasn’t evolved in 100 years!

Yes, the educational system is about two standard deviations worse than a private tutor. There's a name for this effect, but I don't remember it. As someone who was homeschooled, I'll do that for my children as well, and I hope I will be able to afford a tutor to assist with that. I've had no difficulty in life competing with people who went through the public school system, and I want my kids to have the same advant…

> "There's a name for this effect, but I don't remember it."

It's Bloom's 2-sigma problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

> "Bloom concluded that one-to-one tutoring is "too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale", Bloom conjectured that a combination of two or three altered variables may result in a similar performance improvement."; that was in 1984.

My suggestion for this is join a small but active Discord/Slack/IRC group, ask many questions and strive to answer any you can. I wonder if that has been studied, it's not structured, directed, one-to-one tutoring but many moments of one-to-one and many-to-one explaining and helping do happen within it.

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#38

Post by gruez »

undersuit wrote: post #8
lordnacho wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so powerful, why did it not take over the rest of the world, or at least the rest of Eurasia? You'd think just a few people having kids with foreign populations would make the gene conquer the whole planet? They had cows in other places as well, right? One guess might be that winters in Europe were harsher than other population centres (China, India, Middle East), and periodic famines meant that some people w…

Eurasia focused more on mare's milk and China and other rice dominated agricultures had no room for large concentrations of herds.

> China and other rice dominated agricultures had no room for large concentrations of herds.

Yeah it was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373939

tl;dr: rice was so efficient that there was no point in raising cattle

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#39

Post by BurningFrog »

So, bigger picture, if we have the full DNA for people 3000 years old, we can get just as much from it as 23andMe can today or 10 years from now.

Everything from hair color, personality type, addiction potential etc and so on.

The lactose thing is a very tiny tip of a huge iceberg of ancestor knowledge!

Re: Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

#40

Post by Spooky23 »

lordnacho wrote: post #4
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

It doesn't really surprise me much that lactase persistence should be so strongly selected for in a relatively short period of time. Cows and other ungulates possess a rather magical ability to turn something that can't be digested by humans (cellulose) into something that can (milk). Opening up the huge caloric and nutrient resource of cellulose to humans in a relatively replenishable way had to be a giant benefit t…

If it's so powerful, why did it not take over the rest of the world, or at least the rest of Eurasia? You'd think just a few people having kids with foreign populations would make the gene conquer the whole planet? They had cows in other places as well, right? One guess might be that winters in Europe were harsher than other population centres (China, India, Middle East), and periodic famines meant that some people w…

Milk isn’t dairy. Because it’s a liability in many parts of the world without abundant fodder or cold climate. Milk can be dangerous without refrigeration in hours.

Dairy is much more than milk. You can consume cheese, yogurt, butter and many other products where the process of making the dairy product eliminates lactose. Think about things like cooking oil — an impossible thing to manufacture efficiently if you lack the resources to grow oil crops and process them. With diary, you just make butter, which is trivial to do.

Domesticated cows and dairy is a pretty miraculous thing. It’s a shame that the excesses and poor practices around industrialized agriculture and economic policy has made it a ethical problem for some people.

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