Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by Leherenn » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #115

nyolfen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mongolians are also atypically short for a population with a tradition of dairying, though — those with lactase persistence are among the tallest in the world thanks to the massive caloric surplus reducing environmental selection against height in times of scarcity

> those with lactase persistence are among the tallest in the world thanks to the massive caloric surplus That doesn't explain men from Bosnia-Herzegovina and from the former Yugoslavia, generally speaking. Even Wikipedia [1] mentions that area as being above Nordic countries like Sweden when it comes to average male height. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...

Are they supposed to be lactose intolerant?

According to this link posted below [1], Montenegro and Albania are in the top 10 for milk consumption per capita.

[1] http://chartsbin.com/view/1491

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

#162

Post by bad_user » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #127

Spooky23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lard was also very expensive, typically inaccessible to the layman, who preferred to sell all animal products they could get their hands on.

Fat was inaccessible for cooking on a day to day basis, for anyone but the rich, until the introduction of seed oils.

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

#163

Post by bad_user » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

Milk is great.

Milk + potatoes is a full diet.

Not many mutations have spread as fast as lactose tolerance in adulthood, and we don’t have many known adaptations that happened in the neolithic. Goes to show the intense evolutionary pressure for drinking milk in Europe.

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

#164

Post by treeman79 » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

hbarka wrote: post #145

AlotOfReading wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's relatively uncontroversial that contemporary European populations are among the tallest in the world broadly due to caloric surplus and generally good nutrition. However it also worth noting that if we go back farther than the past century or so, it was non-european populations that were among the tallest in the world. That would be populations like the Sioux, Athabascans, and Maori. This kind of points to how b…

Yes, like the divergence between South vs North Korea in just a few generations.

Or Japanese. Older ww2 Japanese are short. Their kids are a head above them.

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

#165

Post by restalis » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

readams wrote: post #44

bonoboTP wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't we evolve the ability to digest cellulose directly like cows, instead of going through cows? My guess: grazing takes extremely long and so we let cows do the boring job of grazing outside all day then we quickly slurp up whe harvested calories in just a few glasses of milk.

Cows have to go through quite a lot to make it happen, with a multistage digestion process, multiple stomachs, regurgitation and additional chewing of food, the right microbiome. In short it's not an easy trait to just "evolve". Lactose tolerance on the other hand is just retaining a trait into adulthood (lactase production) usually lost after weaning.

"Cows have to go through quite a lot to make it happen, with a multistage digestion process, multiple stomachs, regurgitation and additional chewing of food, the right microbiome. In short it's not an easy trait to just «evolve»."

The complexity of digestive apparatus found in Bovidae family and other ruminant mammals is just an optimization. Herbivore monogastric mammals like horses consume cellulose too. There even isn't that necessary for the mammal to be (specialized) herbivore in order have the cellulose digesting ability, as pigs clearly demonstrate. Some extensions in our menu limits are always welcomed. Digesting lactose as adults was nice, but digesting cellulose, even if not that pleasant or efficient, would have been even nicer, as when things went historically bad, it would had came in handy if we could literally just run to the forest for more than to just hide.

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

#166

Post by axaxs » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

mido22 wrote: post #105

axaxs wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the correction and link, guess I should have refreshed on it before commenting.

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

#167

Post by laumars » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #103

laumars wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aft…

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

Nobody was getting into that formula vs breast debate until you just bought that up. You’ve also grossly simplified things so much that you’re misrepresenting the facts yourself (not just in terms of breast vs formula but also milk).

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

#168

Post by KuhlMensch » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

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…

Minor note: The puzzlement around gene-selection isn't, "Why so fast?" but "Why so fast and LATE (between 3000 and 1500 years ago)?"

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

#169

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #167

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aft…

> First let's not get into formula vs breast. That's not relavant right now since formula is designed to imitate breast. Nobody was getting into that formula vs breast debate until you just bought that up. You’ve also grossly simplified things so much that you’re misrepresenting the facts yourself (not just in terms of breast vs formula but also milk).

Which facts am I misrepresentating?

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

#170

Post by j8014 » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

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…

I think the simple answer is we are mammals and feed our newborns milk and since they usually don't die from their breast feedings we equate milk to being good & nutritional. The fact is, we've discovered clay feeding vessels with nipples that contained animals milk from 2000bc near infant graves. The horn was a popular material for feeding bottles during the middle ages.

We've been giving infants and kids milk for a very long time to supplement their diets because the dairy industry was able to reach that far back in our timeline. I think we all understand that the dairy industry has been lobbying and marketing, to get a spot at the table, but so has every other commodity thats available in a global market.