Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

> 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".

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com