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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

#141

Post by scns »

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…

I prefer purified butter for cooking, milkprotein burns so fast.

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

#142

Post by scns »

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.

Goats milk aminoprofile is closer to human milk. Cows milk is 90/10 casein/wheyprotein, goats milk is 60/40 or 40/60 IIRC.

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

#143

Post by gostsamo »

feintruled wrote: post #140

Interesting factoid about lactose tolerance and geography - in Ireland we are big milk drinkers. Growing up I hadn't even heard of anyone being intolerant. And indeed Ireland has the lowest incidence in the world: https://milk.procon.org/lactose-intolerance-by-country/ I wonder how this came to be?

I'd bet on poor soil, cold climate, and isolation. If the earth is not high quality and if the summer is not long enough for high yield per square meter, then you need animals to turn grass in to food. You can't eat too many of your animals for the same reason you can't buy grains from outside - it is expensive and you have too little to offer as export goods.

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

#144

Post by AniseAbyss »

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.

Europe doesn't have the huge steppes that North America and North Asia had for unlimited and ever replenishing cattle.

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

#145

Post by hbarka »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #80
cozos wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an interesting theory ive never heard before. Is it generally accepted that Northern Europeans are taller because their society is less prone to famine?

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.

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

#146

Post by rsj_hn »

olau wrote: post #131
rsj_hn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, so 400 families can support a population that kills a cow per day, eats some of the meat in the family and sells the rest of the meat.

How much land would those 400 families need to feed their cows? I think most prehistoric settlements were small. Around where I live, perhaps 5-20 houses.

pre-historic peoples would travel with their cattle -- their assets were the cattle themselves, not the houses. That doesn't mean they wandered around lost, you would have places you'd go to at different times of year, and may even set up some wells and more permanent structures around those places for you to stay in, but the cattle business was one of always being on the move.

Fun Fact: the word for "capital" derives from "cattle". Cattle was the first form of capital that was accumulated in the neolithic era. It would grow (bear interest), people would hoard it, so you had cattle-inequality, etc. This continued even into the bronze age

From Genesis 13

"So Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev, with his wife and everything he had, and Lot went with him. Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold.

From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram called on the name of the Lord.

Now Lot, who was moving about with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents. But the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together. And quarreling arose between Abram’s herders and Lot’s."

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

#147

Post by Bayart »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #81
User23 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know where modern day Europeans came from? Who were these invaders?

A variable ancestry of post-ice age hunter-gatherers, Neolithic Anatolian farmers and steppe invaders (ie. Indo-Europeans). The ratio varies depending on areas, but that mix is specifically European.

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

#148

Post by watwut »

GuB-42 wrote: post #33
pan69 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Not denying it but in order for a cow to produce milk, it has to give birth to a calf every year.

Just once, not every year. The cow have to be pregnant to start making the milk, but if you keep milking the cow, it will keep making the milk. The cow however does not have to have calf every year.

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

#149

Post by watwut »

lbotos wrote: post #19
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!

This model is known as "flipped classroom" where students self-study video lectures on topics outside of the class, and during class time, the teacher fills in specific knowledge gaps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom I agree, it's very much the future (if we ever get there).

Our teachers tended to try that. Result - nobody read that except most disciplined individuals who skimmed the texts. I think the results with videos would be the same. The experiment was reproduced the same way in elementary school, high school and college. Readings are skipped unless you have to give the teacher something.

But most importantly, it is absurd to make this into a "system". The teachers can do mix of activities in school and homework can be mix of activities. There is zero reason to decide for one place for each activity, put name on it and then demand compliance.

Teachers help is necessary at times, then again students doing individual work and problem solving with no help is important in reasonable doses too.

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

#150

Post by watwut »

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

It was traditional to drink it in rural villages long before dairy industry marketing. Cows give milk till they die and they eat grass, so you basically mainly need to ensure they dont die in winter.

Give options and lack of proper nutrition rural villages had, milk is super practical despite cows being expensive.

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