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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

#41

Post by btilly »

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 reason why milkmaids had good complexions was that something about their job gave them some level of protection against smallpox.

In mammals of all kinds, including humans and cows, milk delivers antibodies to protect babies. Therefore having fresh milk, and the fresher the better, provides protection from smallpox. This both helps survival and, as was apparent in the complexions of the milkmaids, resulted in more attractive adults.

There you have a very strong selection pressure to be able to drink fresh milk.

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

#42

Post by davchana »

ardit33 wrote: post #32
kristopolous wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forev…

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 & thus more easily available as well as nets more money per liter as compared to cow. As a kid, in 1990, I remember the preference was Buffalo Milk, if not then cow, if not then goat milk (not available everywhere), if not then camel or sheep milk (both very rarely available).

Lactose intolerance has got its name only in last 20-30 years, before that it was commonly unaware of, same as peanut allergies are now.

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

#43

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

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.

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

#44

Post by readams »

bonoboTP wrote: post #43
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…

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.

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

#45

Post by grawprog »

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?

rwh86 is correct. That was part of my reasoning. I was thinking aged fermented cheeses not fresh cheeses, which do have more lactose.

Aged fermented cheese is what I was figuring they would have made, because of the lactose issues. These take several months to years to make. I was lumping in higher lactose things like milk, soft unripened cheeses and yogurts together as 'high lactose desperation foods' as arguably, all were likely consumed for the same reasons early on.

I would guess the lower lactose fermented cheeses would have been favoured earlier though. Humans have a history of fermentation and the utility of aged cheese is kind of hard to beat as far as such things go regarding fat and calorie content and preservability.

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

#46

Post by as-j »

bonoboTP wrote: post #43
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…

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.

Why wouldn’t we?? Have you seen a cow? :)

An enzyme to break down milk seems to be such an easier adaptation compared to a whole series of stomach, which are basically a series of fermenters.

Having raised goats the size of their rumens to body is pretty amazing.

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

#47

Post by bonoboTP »

as-j wrote: post #46
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.

Why wouldn’t we?? Have you seen a cow? :) An enzyme to break down milk seems to be such an easier adaptation compared to a whole series of stomach, which are basically a series of fermenters. Having raised goats the size of their rumens to body is pretty amazing.

Couldn't we have invented some way of doing all that cow-stomach stuff in a pot? Like cooking, grinding, fermenting etc, similar to how we turn other inedible plant stuff like wheat into yummy stuff like bread?

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

#49

Post by eloff »

jaynetics wrote: post #12
eloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems your school really sucked, and not just with regards to learning as most schools seem to do. For many people, though, school is also a source of lifelong friendships, romance, and other good things.

University was more like that. School was a prison.

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

#50

Post by eloff »

jodrellblank wrote: post #37
eloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, that's the one I was thinking of.

Your suggestion was part of the process through which I taught myself computer programming. I think it has merit.

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