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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

#101

Post by Smaug123 »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #2

I know this because my kids watch horrible histories. My kids know more about history than I learnt at school by watching horrible histories. Primary school history lessons should watch all the horrible histories, they really are great at teaching kids.

More generally, the "Horrible Science" and "Horrible Histories" (and the first "Murderous Maths" book, though I never read the others) books taught me much more than I ever learned in primary school and the first several years of secondary school.

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

#102

Post by chrisco255 »

missing_paren wrote: post #55
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…

> the way it was done for most of human history Humans were not hunting for most of their history [1] [1] "The human adaptations to meat eating: a reappraisal" Claude Marcel Hladik, Patrick Pasquet https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00545795/document

Humans and their ancestors have been actively hunting for millions of years. We invented fire, spears, and the hand axe (hand held stone tools) for hunting. Not to mention the bow, which is more than 50K years old. The earliest known human settlements are built from mammoth bone. The earliest paintings (more than 30,000 year old cave paintings) depict hunting scenes and the fossilized bones of animals are contained on site.

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

#103

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

laumars wrote: post #96
gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to the age of around 3 we give cows milk to children because we are replacing the human milk that children up to that age would naturally be drinking...

You’re not really supposed to give cows milk to very young children. It’s either breast milk or formula. As to what age you stop that, that usually comes down to a matter of personal preference (there is plenty of research on this topic but every child weans differently and at a certain age the difference it makes starts to become fractions of a percentage)

First let's not get into formula vs breast. That's not relavant right now since formula is designed to imitate breast.

I am aware that cows milk is not sufficient for babies. The approx age is one. The (main) reason is iron. By one most (western) children eat a sufficient diet that cows milk is a sufficient milk source.

My concern is that some parents may see the anti cows milk propaganda and not provide any milk after weaning (almond, oat etc drinks are not milk).

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

#104

Post by rvieira »

axaxs wrote: post #94
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.

Barbaric didn't have the same meaning then as now. To the latin speakers, they made fun of the Germans as sounding like 'Bar Bar' when they talked, hence Barbarians. To call something 'Barbaric' in those times simply meant Germanic.

Same with Vandals.

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

#105

Post by mido22 »

axaxs wrote: post #94
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.

Barbaric didn't have the same meaning then as now. To the latin speakers, they made fun of the Germans as sounding like 'Bar Bar' when they talked, hence Barbarians. To call something 'Barbaric' in those times simply meant Germanic.

Barbarian: word originated from the Greek, antonym for "citizen". The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian

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

#106

Post by chrisco255 »

axaxs wrote: post #94
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.

Barbaric didn't have the same meaning then as now. To the latin speakers, they made fun of the Germans as sounding like 'Bar Bar' when they talked, hence Barbarians. To call something 'Barbaric' in those times simply meant Germanic.

Wasn't it Gaullian at the time?

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

#108

Post by funnybeam »

axaxs wrote: post #94
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.

Barbaric didn't have the same meaning then as now. To the latin speakers, they made fun of the Germans as sounding like 'Bar Bar' when they talked, hence Barbarians. To call something 'Barbaric' in those times simply meant Germanic.

Earlier than the Romans the word is originally Greek and basically meant “foreigner” - someone that doesn’t speak Greek

I wasn’t aware it came from the “bar-bar” sound though so thanks for mentioning that

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

#109

Post by chrisco255 »

kristopolous wrote: post #61
ardit33 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forev…

Correct. In fact milk consumption is high in many places according to this chart http://chartsbin.com/view/1491 These two claims are not in conflict. Just like saying "People have been smoking for thousands of years and tobacco companies were normalizing nicotine addiction" aren't in conflict. They can both be true.* Milk advertisement surely isn't the only factor in dairy consumption. It focused for decades on persu…

There has been no association with milk and lung cancer. While smoking literally has zero nutritional value whatsoever...milk has protein, calcium, fat, omega 3s, several vitamins, minerals and carbs.

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

#110

Post by iguy »

User23 wrote: post #57
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…

Bronze Age Europeans aren’t the ancestors of modern day Europeans. Thanks to modern genetic research we know that they were largely exterminated by invaders a few thousand years ago, at least on the yDNA lineages.

It's true that they were replaced, almost completely in northern Europe. But the claim of TFA is that these skeletons date from after this Indo-European / Yamnaya arrival, and hence that it disproves the theory that lactase persistence arrived with them.

Linguistically, I think we know they had cows but not agriculture, before migrating to Europe & India. (IIRC "cow" comes from PIE?) Which gave credence to the idea that they may have been lactose-tolerant. TFA is one study, so we will presumably eventually see whether this holds up with more data.

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