Prehistoric Babies Drank Animal Milk from Bottles | Hacker News Reader

Prehistoric Babies Drank Animal Milk from Bottles

npr.org

88 pointsoblib21 comments

Anyone who ever had a baby will not be surprised that prehistoric parents used all their creativity and craftsmanship to develop techniques which made it possible for someone other than the mother to feed the child.

According to Wikipedia, they still used cow horns filled with milk and hang above the crib in Scandinavia in the 18th century [0].

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cow%27s_Horn_used_fo...

As someone who had a kid, this is both obvious and a fun confirmation evidence.

One of the things people forget is nature is not perfect and doesn't always work. Sometimes babies don't figure out breastfeeding and die. That's why formula was, in theory, invented. (maybe something about the industrial revolution which required mom's to be away from their children)

I'm not seeing if they were able to definitively say whether the milk fats and proteins they found were cow's milk or goat's milk.

Given that they found these in Bavaria, it's probably moot, as that's squarely in the area you would expect to find lactose-tolerating people, but everything I've read says that goat's milk has lower lactose levels than cow's milk. And, weak evidence, I know, but just about every piece of fiction I've read that featured babies that needed to be kept alive in the absence of their mother or a wet nurse has gone to goat's milk first - off the top of my head, this features in Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth.

I thought babies produced more lactase (lactose-digesting enzyme) anyway, even for people (and ethnic groups) with lactose intolerance in adulthood? Human breastmilk contains lactose - so the body expects to have to break it down at that age.

(I'd have thought any preference for goat's milk over cow's would be connected to the protein it contains.)

Indeed, lactose tolerance declines between 2 and 5 years of age in most people. Natural age of weaning in humans is 3-4 years.

It's not the lactose that gets you as a baby, but the casein. If they fed cow's milk to babies, they would have to separate the whey from the curds, and feed the whey. Goat's milk could be fed straight.

From a modern eye, anyway. They might have given bovine milk straight, if it wasn't they baby's only food source.

What about bovine casein is a problem for babies?

Too much of it to digest while also getting sufficient water and nutrients. Possible allergic sensitivity reactions.

Likely as goats are far easier to keep, own, feed and tend to than cows - especially for the poor. Goats can be kept on any land, can get pregnant/give birth multiple times per year (and therefore provide milk) and have a long weening time when they will give milk. I'd imagine the availability of goats was likely the defining factor in your evidence -but again just an assumption.

It seems logical that these might have been used to feed babies, but the article also says it was previously thought they could have been used to feed sick or elderly. The only justification given for assuming it was a baby was not from the data, but that "Sometimes research on women tends to be a little bit marginalized..." That is very much true, but it does not definitively mean these were baby bottles, it means the possibility may not have been considered previously due to a research bias.

Can't read the article but I believe they were found in babies' graves, which is suggestive. Yes to the risk of research bias though.

There's also the content analysis that they definitely held milk. And Bronze Age is when Europeans would have just been developing lactose persistence:

"A genome-wide scan for selection using DNA gathered from 230 ancient West Eurasians who lived between 6500 and 300 BCE found that the earliest appearance of the allele responsible for lactase persistence occurred in an individual who lived in central Europe between 2450 and 2140 BCE."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutiona...

Yes, but I'm not convinced milk was only used for babies. Fermented milk beverages like kefir have been around for thousands of year. Also, though probably less likely, is cheese: It's conceivable these could have had a part in that, letting the cream rise and pouring out the rest from the spout.

I suspect this might piss off some of the more ardent paleo-diet practitioners /s

This was sarcasm, but the article lists this as a Neolithic invention with domesticated animals. Meaning it actually fits perfectly within the Paleo diet story.

To add to your comment in the title "Prehistoric" , "before history", means before the advent of writing, i.e. 5 000 years or so; history originally referring to times that have written records.

"History" itself now refers to the entire Universe timeline before the present. But prehistory cannot mean that, because that would be pre-BigBang.

So the title "Prehistoric babies Drank Animal Milk from Bottles" could refer to 1491 born Guaraní babies drinking Llama's milk from ceramic bottles and a nipple made from the rubber tree. Cool, but of no relevance to a paleo-diet.

Generally correct; however also wrong in this specific instance. The article also clearly limits scope to Europe, specifically modern-day Bavaria. And therefore uses the specific and appropriate terms "Neolithic", "Bronze Age", and "Iron Age". As Wikipedia calls out [0]:

"The terms "Neolithic" and "Bronze Age" are culture-specific and are mostly limited to cultures of the Old World."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_prehistory#H...

To add to that, terms like Bronze age refer to different times in different locations depending on when bronze began being used. It would refer to an earlier time in the near East than it would in Scandinavia(3300 BC vs 1700 BC). It is not as relevant in the Americas as metallurgy didn't even appear to exist in pre-Columbian North America. There was some minor use of bronze in certain South American cultures but it doesn't seem to have been extensive enough to define a time period.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Near_East#Periodizatio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am...

There are nails from Vikings found in pre-coloumbian US. Happy columbus day

Isn't that 1491 example making for a useless definition? I'm pretty sure pre-historic is something unknown. Celts have been written about by Greeks and Romans. Celts left artifacts, even ones inscribed with images, though no texts as far as I'm aware. It's not precisely prehistoric, nor precisely not. The importance of writing in the definition would be, if it came along with the spread of "civilisation", but it's a gradual thing. So I equate pre-historic with neo-lithic to pastoral lifestyle. But really, I have to click the link to find out whether its a sensationalized title or not.

Sarcasm or not...these alleged "baby bottles" date to well after the end of the paleolithic era.

It would be like a future civilization digging up a modern plastic baby bottle and saying that will really piss of the then current practitioners of a paleo diet.

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