Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk | Hacker News Reader

Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk

sciencemag.org

191 pointsguerby175 comments

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 to those who could digest milk.

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 production methods and gut microbiota to take care of the issues.

> 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.

Look at modern, traditional pastoralist cultures. Most rely on dairy for staple protein. Very few animals are kept for meat alone, in a traditional economic context. Most require several uses (plowing, transport, textiles, dairy, meat, currency) to justify their care.

Some cultures even outlaw eating beef, and most slaughter mostly when they don't have enough feed or for special occasions.

Dairy is absolutely essential to the nutritional economy of most pastoralist cultures that we know about. As you say, lactose persistence is not an absolute barrier... but I think this sort of evidence suggests that dairy is a very significant part of human history. Pastoralism with or without milk is a different beast.

You get milk every day in a reasonable quantity. Before refrigeration killing a cow meant inviting the whole town to a feast at your house. Smaller animals can be eaten by one family before it spoils, but not a cow.

Salting, drying and various other methods for preserving meat have been known for a long time.

Yes, even with preserving there is too much meat. DDG says one cow has about 250 kg of meat. This is enough to feed a family for over a year.

There is also enough edible meat that cannot be preserved: the head, some organs. These are prepared immediately, hence the feast for the village.

A modern family with two kids or an agrarian family with a ton of kids? Plus the agrarian family is doing so much manual labor that they can probably eat the modern family under the table.

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.

> Fun Fact: the word for "capital" derives from "cattle"

"cheptel" (french) / cattle / capital seem to derive from "caput" / "capita" latin for head(s)

For the etymology, capital today can mean everything from the capital city of Spain is madrid, to a "capital crime", a capital column, etc. I refer you to the second meaning here:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Capital

Since we are talking about neolithic cattle culture, the word does not come from Latin but from the PIE root "kaput" meaning "head", as in counting heads of cattle or the chief (principal) part of a loan as opposed to the interest paid, which is the secondary part.

The word "Cattle" also comes from "kaput".

Other words coming from "kaput" are "chapter", "chief", "caudillo".

My source for this is the AMAZING BOOK "A History of Interest Rates", by Sidney Homer, which is available on Amazon Kindle and is highly recommended for anyone interested in financial history.

Here is S.H.:

"Cattle breeding has supplied us with many financial terms used in later money economies. For example, there is our own word capital and our term pecuniary, from pecus, meaning a “flock” in Latin. Sumerians used the word mas for calves and for interest. The Egyptian term ms, meaning interest, is derived from the verb msj, which means “to give birth.” Early Greeks, in fact, valued their precious metals in terms of cattle. In the Odyssey one of the suitors promised to bring Ulysses a contribution “of bronze and gold to the value of twenty oxen.”

Cattle probably comprised the first true productive assets or capital of tribes or individuals. Ownership of cattle determined the social position of individuals and families and still does in parts of Africa and, indeed, in parts of the United States. Surplus labor could be stored and retained in the form of cattle. "

caput, kaput, that's what I'm saying

Yeah, I should have said "both capital and cattle come from the same PIE root, originally used in a financial sense when referring to heads of cattle".

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."

It's relatively easy to preserve meat by making jerky or through fermentation. Cultures have known about these methods for a long long time.

> 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.

Not true, a cow starts to make milk not when it becomes pregnant, but on delivery. The milk production declines in time and stops completely about the time the cow is pregnant again.

In conventional agriculture, cows whose milkproduction declines get slaughtered, even when pregnant with a developed fetus inside.

Milk production is also a continuum of data samples over the life of the animal. Eating the animal is one data sample and you can’t duplicate the animal after collecting the data.

Selecting for milk production would be a lot more accurate than selecting for meat tastiness, longevity or even, to an lesser extent, health.

Actually we select for both depending on the line of the stock and have been doing so for a rather long time. You do lose the animal after killing it of course but we have a huge amount data from cattle breeding charts that lets a branch be trimmed if there's some fault with it that will damage the genetic tree.

You can’t use the lens of modern agriculture and data collection to look at the birth and growth of animal husbandry.

We have enough now that the conversation isn’t about if we can afford to eat our cows but how fast we can eat them. The top of this thread was discussing how we got into milk harvesting so broadly when so few have the genes for it. It was more efficient for people handing down knowledge through oral tradition.

I can't decide whether that first para is satire or not

You could also harvest and consume the blood[1], without having to kill any cattle.

1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/cow-blood-kenya-maasai

This must be more dangerous disease transmission wise?

If you choose to consume the blood raw, then yes, it can be a vector for pathogens. However, most pastoralist societies know how to keep their herds healthy.

That's for the vector from cow to human. But cutting into your cow also makes it more likely for your cow to catch something, doesn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet

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

Milk is vastly more efficient than directly eating cows. It’s the same reason eggs are cheaper than eating chickens, compounded by an even longer lifespan.

The comparison isn't between milk and not-milk. As I mentioned previously, you can eat dairy without lactase persistence.

Secondly, lactation is a pretty different energy calculus from eggs. The calories in it can be used to grow the baby animal it's intended for. That would still be less efficient than direct consumption, but probably not as substantially with ancient animals.

"For one, you can simply eat the cows, the way it was done for most of human history."

Besides what sibling comments already mentioned, eating the livestock directly meant having to herd larger groups of animals. One hypothesis that comes to mind that explains how lactase persistence might spread so fast was the enabling auto-sufficiency on small family-level herding that helped with survival. The primary target of plagues and war were the large settlements, and I imagine it was very useful to be able to live on small and thus low profile herd that roamed away in the wilderness, far away from the population-limiting events, or at least sitting them out somewhere close by but safe. This is harder to do with large herds, which for one consume the grassing stock faster, require more active movement, and thus confers inferior stealthy means of existence that is so important in face of wars of that time.

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

I am the tallest by far in my extended family and also the only one without lactase persistence. My father is the tallest in his generation and also the only without lactase persistence. Not statistically significant, but worth mentioning.

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 big a factor social, economic and political context has on population metrics like height. Moreover, certain diets and populations simply make for shorter people. Disentangling all the effects is complicated.

For the data, I'm half-remembering a table from a paper I read years ago. Ourworldindata has a very similar table with pretty reasonable citations, so it checks out:

https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#how-does-environment...

Or we can speculate the the societies where there is more freedom are taller.

It could also be sexual selection as this stature change is too fast and usually the environment difference takes several hundred generations to show difference.

The timeline is so small I'd argue it's actually free society enabling people to chase their sexual imperitive and this sexual selection is resulting in taller population, not nutrition.

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.

> the way it was done for most of human history

Humans were not hunting for most of their history [1]

[1] "The human adaptations to meat eating: a reappraisal" Claude Marcel Hladik, Patrick Pasquet https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00545795/document

The paper you're linking does not support the conclusion you're drawing and I'd encourage you to read it more carefully. Modern humans are omnivores, which means their diet included both animal and plant products, though in different proportions at different times and places.

Moreover, the suggestion that humans started eating meat recently is patently ridiculous in the face of the material record. The nicest way I can put this is to strongly recommend spending some time with Wikipedia. A good starting point would be the stone tools page, in particular the section on the Acheulean industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool#Mode_II:_The_Acheul...

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-...

Chimps not only hunt, they over-hunt:

> The apes have killed and eaten so many red colobus monkeys, the population has fallen by 89% and they are having to find new prey

https://janegoodall.ca/our-stories/10-things-chimpanzees-eat...

Don't believe me and the BBC? How about Jane Goodall?

> One of the earliest and most significant discoveries made by Jane Goodall was that chimpanzees hunt for and eat meat.

Bonobos hunt at the same rate as chimps:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190430091846.h...

And, again, early humans hunted:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-f...

> The diet of the earliest hominins was probably somewhat similar to the diet of modern chimpanzees: omnivorous, including large quantities of fruit, leaves, flowers, bark, insects and meat (e.g., Andrews & Martin 1991; Milton 1999; Watts 2008). Tooth morphology and dental microwear studies suggest that the diet of some hominins may have included hard food items such as seeds and nuts, and underground storage organs (USOs) such as roots and tubers (Jolly 1970; Peters & O'Brien 1981; Teaford & Ungar 2000; Luca et al. 2010). By at least 2.6 million years ago, a remarkable expansion in this diet started to occur; some hominins began incorporating meat and marrow from small to very large animals into their diet.

Humans and their ancestors have been actively hunting for millions of years. We invented fire, spears, and the hand axe (hand held stone tools) for hunting. Not to mention the bow, which is more than 50K years old. The earliest known human settlements are built from mammoth bone. The earliest paintings (more than 30,000 year old cave paintings) depict hunting scenes and the fossilized bones of animals are contained on site.

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 would just scrape enough calories from milk. 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.

The article does say it happened too fast to be from natural drift or population turnover, but I'm not sure what turnover means. Is that replacement say from a conquering tribe?

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 the resources to grow oil crops and process them. With diary, you just make butter, which is trivial to do.

Domesticated cows and dairy is a pretty miraculous thing. It’s a shame that the excesses and poor practices around industrialized agriculture and economic policy has made it a ethical problem for some people.

Let it ferment. Just add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir

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

And it's still great.

(Though to be sure, lard was the cooking fat of choice in much but not all of the world.)

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.

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

> If it's so powerful, why did it not take over the rest of the world.

Time. For going from 1/10 000 000 to 25% of the population in 300 generations (7500 years), you need to have a gene that give you 5% more offsprings at each generation.

And distance. Not so much gene flow across the Mediterranean until we got good at sailing.

And climate. Milk was an advantage against other food sources available at the time in northern Europe, but this wasn't necessarily true elsewhere.

Climate also reflects on the level of available grass that the herders had to take into account when deciding where to move. Europe receives smaller quantities of precipitation as one goes from west to east, and then Europe's lush vegetation transitions into steppes and harsher climate beyond Volga region (Europe-Asia border). It must have been a tough call to decide to go eastward, and from what history tells us, that herders chose to migrate westward, not the other way around.

Europe, throughout most of its history, was a corner of the world. It was a final destination for tribes that were misplaced by overpopulation, decease, and famine from the Middle East and Central Asia.

My theory is that in order for this mutation to spread it must give a cutting edge advantage in an equal environment. However, the migration pressure was toward Europe, not out of it. What's more, other populations already had their ways to utilize derry products and the advantage might not have been so crucial. Therefore, the gene spread had been dependent mostly on internal migration and local populations mixing together.

Of course, this theory has its weaknesses. It does not account for the effects of Alexander the Great, the Silk Road, the Roman empire or the depopulation of Eastern Europe through slave trade during the middle ages. At the same time, most of these factors would open trade routes and cultural exchange but not the large scale migrations necessary for a significant genetic mix. Slavery might offer something, but it was recent and slaves are usually the most disadvantaged group in a society which does not help their genes being promoted.

>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. It's easy to make, it comes from curdled cream, it stores for long periods, and it's calorie dense.

Maybe milk drinking came at a time of extreme hunger where people just drank it directly instead of waiting?

Cheese has about the same lactose as milk, doesn't it?

Hard cheeses contain almost no lactose; it's consumed by bacteria during the maturation process.

A way to store a surplus food that contains high protean and fat is another huge benefit of dairy. Hard cheeses can be stored for years in the right conditions and these conditions are achievable for ancient people (caves).

And if done right, the cheese becomes tastier as it ages.

Not as important today, but more important back then: aging your cheese also concentrates the salt. Salty foods are tasty.

Good point. Back then salt was valuable in places just short distances from the ocean. Humans need salt, especially when doing hard physical labor, sweating all day.

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.

Eurasia focused more on mare's milk and China and other rice dominated agricultures had no room for large concentrations of herds.

> China and other rice dominated agricultures had no room for large concentrations of herds.

Yeah it was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373939

tl;dr: rice was so efficient that there was no point in raising cattle

>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?

It's cooler in Europe. Food stays better longer there. For example the daily mean temperature in Prague in July is 20 C, with a low of 15 C, so you could easily keep a cellar below that. Cheese will keep for a while. Plus, there's often a nearby mountain range with a convenient glacier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade#Pre-19th_century_met...

Uhh, they just drank different milk. Ox milk, goat milk, etc.

Cattle are not always found in other places.

You might be thinking of a different animal. An ox isn't a good choice as an milking animal, as it typically is a castrated male bovine. If female, it would at least produce milk, but then it would just be a cow used for plowing, and would have the same milk as a dairy cow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox. Maybe you mean a water buffalo?

Lactose is present in all mammal milks to some degree and thus lactase persistence can have some benefits regardless of the specific animal the milk comes from.

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

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.

Didn't the bronce age end like three thousand years ago? It's my understanding that by that time the Indo-Europeans were already well established. Besides while they contributed a large fraction of the ancestry of contemporary Europeans a significant fraction of the ancestry is still from the middle eastern farmers which conquered Europe before them. Even if you only look at the Y chromosome, there is still quite a bit none R1 floating around.

It's true that they were replaced, almost completely in northern Europe. But the claim of TFA is that these skeletons date from after this Indo-European / Yamnaya arrival, and hence that it disproves the theory that lactase persistence arrived with them.

Linguistically, I think we know they had cows but not agriculture, before migrating to Europe & India. (IIRC "cow" comes from PIE?) Which gave credence to the idea that they may have been lactose-tolerant. TFA is one study, so we will presumably eventually see whether this holds up with more data.

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.

Indo Europeans from pontic steppe and farmers from Anatolia. Northern europeans have more ancestry in the prior.

Possibly the celts and prior Indo-Europeans?

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

You can find answers to these questions in recent David Reich’s book.

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

Evolution should be measured in generations, not years. According to Wikipedia, the peppered moth has 1 generation per year; in humans, it's probably like 1 per 20 years. So 50 years moth-time is still 1000 years human-time. Still quite fast though.

“Punctuated Equilibrium” - long periods of stability, and then short periods of great change.

I find it interesting to see the effect in other fields in my life - for example, I’ve been tracking net worth each month for almost a decade, and it follows a similar pattern of slow (or no) growth ... and then big jumps.

There are bacteria that can eat nylon, a man-made molecule. Nylon was invented in 1935 and these bacteria were discovered in 1975. The enzymes used by these bacteria only work on nylon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria

Bacteria have much shorter generations and this facilitates rapid evolution.

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.

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?

You can convert cellulose into glucose but it takes things like this (special cultured bacteria, extremely processed cellulose, and an ultrafilter to remove glucose to drive the reaction): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bit.26022080...

Or strong acids and 190°C over a catalyst.

Cellulose is remarkably strong, especially with lignin in the structure too. We're lucky anything can digest it at all.

Which brings me to mycology, probably the best way to extract energy from cellulose for humans. Sterilize, inoculate, keep moist, and harvest a significant percentage of the source material as good carbohydrates and protein.

My understanding is cows don't digest cellulose either. They have those stomachs to provide an environment for bacteria that can to live. Cows then digest that bacteria.

Which is digestion of course, but it isn't that cows can do it. Our large intestine does the same thing but it isn't anywhere near big enough to get a significant amount of energy from cellulose.

Seeing cows as bacteria eaters is a challenging but powerful image. Really clever point.

We don't have the right kind of tooth to graze

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 an intolerance with age naturally, but people that consume much milk will have that process slowed down. I think the genetic factors can just accelerate the process that is responsible to induce intolerance.

> 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.

There is fats in milk, the energy is not exclusively lactose.

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

Note that there's still no evidence the ability to digest lactose is an actual adaptation as opposed to some allele that got accidentally fixed in some populations due to genetic drift.

When you put it like that I understand why Indians worship cows.

Hindu folk revere cows, but not all folk from India are Hindu.

Well atleast their ancestors used to be

Maybe not surprising biologically, considering the role of nutrition as a limiting factor on human (and most organisms) population. Say an ancient culture developed a lifestyle heavily fishing relient. If the resources (fish) were plentiful, it's not hard to imagine fish becoming a staple diet fast and subsequent adaptations to the nutritional pros and cons emerging within just a few generations.

OTOH, milk requires domestication of mammals. For milk to be a staple (as it is among many existing pastoralist cultures), processing and preservation techniques (yoghurt, cheese, etc) need to be developed. It's (IMO) a pretty complex assortment of dependant cultural and biological adaptations in both humans and animals.

Genetic evidence like this suggests that the adaptations spread fast. It also suggests a substantial role played by pastoralist cultures in neolithic and bronze age prehistory.

Neolithic history is tends to emphasize grain agriculture. These people left more artifacts. They left large settlements (eg Jericho) for us to dig up. They became urban "civilizations." Common, orthodox interpretation (eg the common marxist narrative) focuses on these a lot. Complex relationships between economics & social structure are inferred. etc.

Pastoralism gets a lot less attention. They left few artifacts, fewer settlements. They weren't urban, making them less interesting to most 19th and 20th century historians. Yet, we have lots of evidence that they were both many and significant.

Some of the earliest histories we have (Sumerian, 1st Dynasty Egyptian) suggests all sorts of contact, cultural exchange and conflict with large populations of pastoralists. Ancient historians attributed many innovations in weapons (eg chariots, compound bows) and other technological advancements (eg wheels) to pastoralist cultures.

While speculative, I'd also suggest that the earliest "nations" may have been pastoralists in the Yuval Noah Harari sense of the term. This also makes them the first civilizations in the same sense. They were also likely to have been innovators and originators of long distance trade and communication.

None of that is proved by the spread of lactose tolerance, but it does suggest that pastoralism was a very significant lifestyle in the lead up to pre classical cultures.

I know this because my kids watch horrible histories.

My kids know more about history than I learnt at school by watching horrible histories.

Primary school history lessons should watch all the horrible histories, they really are great at teaching kids.

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!

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 advantage.

And that's before thinking about the people whose lives were ruined by the influences of their peers, by the bullying, the drugs, or the teen pregnancy. Some of those people who went to my school, before I switched to homeschooling, are no longer among the living.

I didn't get the best education in public school - though I made up for it in college - but I did grow up with friends in vastly-different socioeconomic status than my own.

There's a tragedy of the commons here: parents who can afford private schools and tutors for their kids set them up for more success, but it also saps funding for public schools and families that can't afford that. (Public education would be better funded and higher quality if rich families had a reason to care.) Basically, white flight, though more tilted towards class now than race.

I want to send my kids to public school, but I know my individual actions wouldn't do much to fix the inequality.

You're exercising your free choice between well-being of your own children and the community at large — and people who choose private tutors make their choice as well. It's great that people have that choice of how to use the money they earned.

What's great about it? Is it great because it makes the world a better place? Seems like the opposite might be true if capitalizing on the choice to use private education creates a less educated population in general

> "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 join a small but active Discord/Slack/IRC group, ask many questions and strive to answer any you can. I wonder if that has been studied, it's not structured, directed, one-to-one tutoring but many moments of one-to-one and many-to-one explaining and helping do happen within it.

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.

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.

I’m sure my experience with school is not unique.

School was a prison, quite literally a mandatory daycare service which as a side project may have taught some kids.

But really, I’m 30 now. I look back in awe that we subject our kids to this. The friendships you forge would happen without being in prison.

I used to compare school to daycare, until I realized that is too generous. At daycare they let you do whatever you want, play, explore, socialize, read. The toilets are available at all times. School was quite a step down from daycare.

University was more like that. School was a prison.

True - and I think schools can enable this and teach knowledge in vastly superior ways.

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.

More generally, the "Horrible Science" and "Horrible Histories" (and the first "Murderous Maths" book, though I never read the others) books taught me much more than I ever learned in primary school and the first several years of secondary school.

Thanks for the recommendation, this seems awesome :)

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.

Do you have a source for the IVC use of milk? I'm not familiar with any direct evidence that the IVC consumed milk or milk products. They did rear animals that can be milked, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the IVC used them for milk rather than meat.

The lactase persistence variant found in India, 13910T, is the same as prevalent in Europe, and likely arrived with Steppe pastoralists - after the fall of the Indus Valley Civilization. If the IVC had widespread lactase persistence mutations developing independently of the Steppe, you'd expect other variants to show up in the population, but it doesn't. Lactase persistence in India also closely tracks Steppe ancestry, suggestive that the IVC were largely lactose intolerant. They did have significant cattle, and were the birthplace of Zebu cattle domestication.

I heard on a documentary that definitely cheese was more digestible than milk, and helped to popularize cheese with populations that couldn't digest milk.

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

Lot Indians are lactose intolerant which is weird if they have been drinking milk for thousands of years.

So, bigger picture, if we have the full DNA for people 3000 years old, we can get just as much from it as 23andMe can today or 10 years from now.

Everything from hair color, personality type, addiction potential etc and so on.

The lactose thing is a very tiny tip of a huge iceberg of ancestor knowledge!

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.

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"

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”.

Why do they assume constant genetic bracing at that era, but these tribes could have been isolated and thus not gotten the gene.

Secondly, does not having the gene make drinking milk impossible? I'm pretty sure that when starving anything would go.

This seems somehow relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTp4kELkSY

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.

Wasn't the theory not that milk provides protection from smallpox, but proximity to cows transmits cowpox, which itself provides protection from small pox?

Then again, in a world where >95% of people are farmers and there's no refrigeration (so milk has to be consumed fast), I'm not sure the difference between handling cows and drinking milk is much of a difference.

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 implied people didn't distinguish between regular TB and bovine) and he mentions wanting to get a cow, but one that's been tested for TB to make sure his son doesn't get sick like him. Because humans can and do catch it from cows.

There's also

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

which you get from unpasteurized milk. Our ancestors had a lot of experiences that are obscure now.

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...

By the time Germans became familiar to the Romans milk consumption was common. The common source of dietary fats for Romans at the time was olive oil. The common source of fats for the Germans was butter which the Romans looked down upon as barbaric.

"All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part that cooks with olive oil, and the part that cooks with butter."

Greeks did use butter, but not milk.

But Illyrians, (northern neighbors, in modern day Albania) did drink milk. At some point they were invaded/incorporated by the Roman empire, and about 190 B.c. 'drinking milk' was not such a unfathomed thing. (but, albeit, might have been not a 'aristocratic' thing to do).

http://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Docum...

So, romans didn't drink milk originally, but their neighbors across the sea did.

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.

Earlier than the Romans the word is originally Greek and basically meant “foreigner” - someone that doesn’t speak Greek

I wasn’t aware it came from the “bar-bar” sound though so thanks for mentioning that

Wasn't it Gaullian at the time?

Same with Vandals.

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.

My grandfather's family were all lactose intolerant (missing the mutation). They lived in a mountain area where raising cows was one the main food resource, so dairy product were practically present in almost every meal.

2 generations later I am the only one missing the mutation in my generation, everyone else has it (dozens on cousins). It seems that a combination of 2 parents where 1 has the mutation and 1 is missing it results in most of the children inheriting the mutation. That explains the fast "conversion".

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

Parents give milk to their children because it makes them taller. See e.g.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0301446080268046...

https://academic.oup.com/advances/article-abstract/10/suppl_... (a "maybe", but also increased mineralization)

https://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/18/6/1881.short

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X1...

https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=2867428133...

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 habit of feeding of milk to children is entirely manufactured by the organizations that produce it. There's lots of documentation to demonstrate this.

Whether or not it's a good idea is immaterial.

I've honestly never seen anyone within that research domain state otherwise, maybe you can enrich my knowledge there.

I and other readers are excitedly open to new perspectives

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.

After reading the other responses to your earlier comment, I'm curious... In that "research domain" do they also attribute milk consumption in Eastern Europe in the last century and in India 5000 years ago to Big Dairy?

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.

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.

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 forever.

Correct. In fact milk consumption is high in many places according to this chart http://chartsbin.com/view/1491

These two claims are not in conflict. Just like saying "People have been smoking for thousands of years and tobacco companies were normalizing nicotine addiction" aren't in conflict. They can both be true.*

Milk advertisement surely isn't the only factor in dairy consumption.

It focused for decades on persuading parents to give it to their children using nutritional claims.

* - Also, I'm not using tobacco to imply a devious or malicious use by the milk industry or that their products are unhealthy. No. The two industries used many of the same marketing consultants in the mid-20th century and so ended up with similar campaigns ... that's really it.

There has been no association with milk and lung cancer. While smoking literally has zero nutritional value whatsoever...milk has protein, calcium, fat, omega 3s, several vitamins, minerals and carbs.

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.

> 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.

> [...] mythological literature [...]

Mythology and religious beliefs have no place in a rational discussion (except insofar as they're the subject of the discussion, which isn't the case here).

Understood, how about saying, from long time ago, even before or from BCE era. The historical literature (not mythological) from last 1000-1500 years all mention various dairy products & milk.

The mythological part was only about the Cow as mother part.

The buffalo milk, dog cats kittens part is from my own experience in 1990s from there.

...and why we give diamond rings as an engagement token.

Up to the age of around 3 we give cows milk to children because we are replacing the human milk that children up to that age would naturally be drinking...

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 after weaning (almond, oat etc drinks are not milk).

> 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?

It was already known to be a very recently-developed mutation, so that's not that surprising. It might pin it down a bit more, and it is interesting that it indicates that it spread so quickly in the first couple of thousand years.

Because so many people are still not lactase persistent, it is still possible to see how much that changes over time and the change might be noticeable over a relatively few generations.

Isn't the sample size a little small to draw conclusions about a whole continent?

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

Probably will be updated :)

How fast is it lost? How many generations? And how fast is it gained..

probably because of famine periods during those thousands of years, more people survived who could digest milk, thus selecting for that gene

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