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Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

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

#121

Post by pm90 »

kristopolous wrote: post #58
pm90 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Milk is nutritious though. Besides calories it also provides amino acids. For non first world communities it thus formed an essential part of a healthy diet.

That's not the point in contestation. Specifically it's "how obsessed we are with giving milk to kids because it’s so healthy" The word "because" is a fascinating bridge. Whatever follows after reveals unstated assumptions hidden deep in the speakers mind. I'm objecting to the specific premise that it's some rational decision made individually by each parent based upon nutrition. Instead I'm claiming our cultural hab…

Occams razor. The cultural habit of feeding milk to kids is more likely to be vestige of a culture trying to provide sufficient nutrition for its young, just as every culture thinks it’s healthy to provide its young with its staple. If it wasn’t a good idea, cultures that provided milk to its young would not thrive.

Your argument seems dangerously analogous to anti vaccination conspiracy theories.

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

#122

Post by ycombinete »

bobobob420 wrote: post #65

Indians (or people present in common day india-pakistan-nepal) were drinking milk before 5500 BC..makes you wonder. And most of that was fermented (cheese (paneer) and yogurt). Makes you wonder if the fermentation made it easier to eat and helped developed the gene.

The fermentation process involves bacteria consuming the lactose in the milk. This makes the milk products easier to digest for people who are lactose intolerant

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

#123

Post by seszett »

raxxorrax wrote: post #117
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…

I think the actual genetic factors for lactose intolerance are very rare. It probably has more to do with gut flora and consumption. I am slightly intolerant and have symptoms if I stuff myself with raw milk. Other than that it is no problem. I have a friend with the genetic condition and even he drinks milk. He does get problem quickly, but not if he drinks coffee with some milk or yogurt. I think all people develop…

> I think the actual genetic factors for lactose intolerance are very rare. It probably has more to do with gut flora and consumption.

Not really, lactose is basically converted straight into glucose by lactase, and if you don't produce lactase the lactose is going to be digested by a variety of bacteria and turned into a whole host of products (some of them usable by the body) but mostly gas. There isn't really a way to avoid that, even though gut flora can be more or less efficient and allow non-lactase-producers to mostly digest milk, it's never as efficient as using lactase.

> I think all people develop an intolerance with age naturally

No, it's a well-researched thing, some populations of humans keep producing lactase after their childhood and some don't. It's not related to the milk consumption of an individual, either.

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

#124

Post by edumucelli »

Good for them, they would avoid prostate cancer [1], breast cancer [2] and weaker bones [3] ...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6683061/ [2] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/925896 [3] https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/milk-may-be-linked-to-...

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

#125

Post by pm90 »

wtmt wrote: post #91
davchana wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India too, have milk & its products as a major part of diet since millions of years. All the historical & mythological literature literally says Cow as a tree which gives life, so most of the time being called as Cow-mother. Kids of few hours to people almost near end of their life & everybody between uses milk. About till 20 years ago, many pet dogs & cats & their kids too were fed milk. Buffalo milk is denser & thu…

> India too, have milk & its products as a major part of diet since millions of years. Citation needed on “millions of years.”

There is none, it’s “mythology” lol.

This absurd timeline is the result of a culture that portrays its faith as fact, confusing children and adults alike. I remember learning timelines of human civilizations at school and asking my parents about how certain mythological events (eg from the Ramayana or Mahabharata) fit in that timeline and heard some amazing rationalization or was summarily ignored depending on the difficulty.

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

#126

Post by ath92 »

edumucelli wrote: post #124

Good for them, they would avoid prostate cancer [1], breast cancer [2] and weaker bones [3] ... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6683061/ [2] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/925896 [3] https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/milk-may-be-linked-to-...

Literally in the abstract of the first article you posted:

Consumption of total, individual, or subgroups of dairy products was not statistically significantly associated with prostate cancer risk overall (HR = 1.05, 95% CI = 0.96–1.15 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) or stratified by severity, except for regular-fat dairy product intake with late-stage prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.37, 95% CI = 1.04–1.82 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) and 2%-fat milk intake with advanced prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.02–1.28 comparing the higher than median intake with no intake group). Our findings do not support the previously reported harmful impact of dairy consumption on overall prostate cancer risk among men in the United States.

The second article mentions the following with regards to bone fractures correlating with dairy consumption: "this correlation may not be causal and might be due to confounding by factors such as vitamin D status and ethnicity"

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

#127

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Spooky23 wrote: post #40
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…

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…

Lard was the "cooking oil" of choice before modern industrial production shifted to seed oils.

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

#128

Post by lostlogin »

edumucelli wrote: post #124

Good for them, they would avoid prostate cancer [1], breast cancer [2] and weaker bones [3] ... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6683061/ [2] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/925896 [3] https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/milk-may-be-linked-to-...

Those are some soft findings, even by the standard of any diet related science. The second two links are on very specific populations (which they note) and may not be relevant to a wider population.

The prostate cancer/milk connection is not made in that link and it states “In conclusion, in this prospective analysis, dairy product consumption was not associated with prostate cancer overall, which does not support the harmful impact of dairy products on prostate cancer reported in previous studies”.

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

#129

Post by 082349872349872 »

perl4ever wrote: post #70
btilly wrote: post #41

My favorite theory for the development of lactose tolerance is that drinking fresh milk offers protection from smallpox. As a sanity check, http://books.google.com/books?id=GyE8Qt-kS1kC&pg=PA151&dq=&l... includes an estimate that approximately 10% of children in the 1700s died from smallpox. The first successful smallpox vaccine was made from cows. And the inspiration for the vaccine was the realization that the reas…

This seems like kind of a tunnel vision outlook from knowing one particular bit of trivia. Have you heard of bovine tuberculosis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_bovis The reason it comes to mind is not because I've ever been near a farm, but I was just reading a collection of letters by a writer in the late 1940s, who had a small farm on an island. He was dying very slowly of tuberculosis (it seems impli…

Humans are also vectors for swine diseases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMOPdUvKUwM&t=84

https://porkgateway.org/resource/biosecurity-of-pigs-and-far...

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

#130

Post by akiselev »

burtonator wrote: post #72
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…

One of the biggest misconceptions of evolution is that it's a slow and gradual process. Under the right conditions it can happen VERY fast.

Very fast. The canonical example is the peppered moth (Biston betularia) [1] in the UK changing color from white to black and back to white in the last two hundred years. Coal power plants during the industrial revolution covered the surrounding areas in soot and darkened the white lichen covering those trees, which meant that the white moths were more visible to predators. Once clean air regulations and technological improvements eliminated the soot, the gene that turned them black became a liability and the population was once again taken over by the white moths.

The specific mutation event was traced to around 1819 [2] and by the turn of the century, the white variant was all but gone around industrialized cities (someone even wrote Darwin about it in the 1870s). Starting in the 50s and 60s, the distribution began to reverse once the air started to get cleaner and now we're back to a largely white moth population.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17951

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