The lactose-tolerance mutation

Compare that to cereal crops like wheat or maize or vegetable crops, which require long uninterrupted growing seasons and irrigation.

Why is this important? When a troop of rampaging soldiers cuts through your village and pillages everything in sight, you grab your cows and family and boogey out of there. Essentially, you have a mobile food supply.

In the event of a drought, you have options as well. With wheat or vegetables, no rain == no food. With a dairy animal, you go kill the guy who controls the next pasture and let Old Bessie the cow feast on the grass. (The other key development was the introduction of potatoes, which remain buried under the ground safe from the rampaging army above -- my Irish ancestors subsisted on potatoes hidden from the English taxman and a cow that lived in the house.)

In Europe and the Near East, these things were really important, because there was always pillaging armies marching across the continent. Today, it's unlikely that some Mongol horde is going to loot my supermarket, so I drink milk and eat cheese because they are really tasty.

The success of the lactose tolerance mutation may be partly due to sexual selection[1]. It's been proposed that neoteny[2] is a key feature of human evolution. The ability to drink milk as an adult is a neotenous trait, and it may have been "accidentally" selected for when other beautiful features were sexually selected.

David Rothenberg's book, Survival of the Beautiful[3], argues that biologists are sometimes "blinded" by natural selection and ignore sexual selection.

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[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny

[3] - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtomics/2012/10/25/...

edit: Growing up, we always had 2% in the house. From college on I drink skim, occasionally (once every few months) I get 1 or 2%, just to up the fat content (I'm a runner, not terribly concerned with weight gain, more or less trying to maintain body mass...)

Here's a tip for others - you can buy Lactase pills at a pharmacy and take them just before you eat any meal that contains milk. This gives you the enzymes you need without your body producing in it.

And it's really awesome. I only started doing this a year ago, but now I can eat many more cheeses, drink milkshakes, etc., without feeling bad. And it happens surprisingly often - every time you want to eat pizza, pastas, etc.

Seriously, is you're lactose intolerant, give it a try - it improved my life considerably.

Odd that they don't mention physical displacement: invasion, dispossession, death. The gene would likely have coincided with other developments of civilization, such as weapon technology, greater numbers, greater cooperation, specialised soldiers etc. Maybe there's evidence against it, but odd it's not addressed, with a puzzlingly high "selection differential". Another factor might have been sexual selection, if the new folk were healthier looking etc.

Note they are talking specifically about the West - agriculture and civilization spread throughout the East without this gene.

I'm just glad I'm not lactose intolerant, so thanks to whoever in my billions of ancestors decided to keep at it.

Really? A plant-based whole foods diet is probably the best cure out there for heart disease and type 2 diabetes. (google Dean Ornish, Neil Barnard, John McDougall)

The author tells a good story but his bashing of agriculture is unsupported.

It moderates strong flavors, smooths out acidic drinks, fluffs up eggs among many other thousands of beneficial food uses.

Other dairy products like butter and cheese are key to an immense palette of flavors and cooking techniques.

Dairy is so delicious that I've even seen people with violent milk allergies put up with the consequences just to scarf down a few bites of custard or ice cream.

Plus, animals can graze on land you can't farm, and they're very portable.

[1] http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/the-indo-european-a...

Likewise, people in Sweden for example have a 100x higher lactose tolerance, because there's less sunlight throughout the year.

"We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, “mampires” who feed on the fluids of other animals."

Not hating for those who want to feel good about their love for milk, but I don't think today's milk is much more than a treat and baking ingredient.

I believe the benefit of drinking milk is obvious. A herd can take calories from grass and drink mud, while the human enjoys a source of clean, caloric, nutrient rich drink that can go anywhere. Farmers, on the other hand, can just be ran over, pilled or sieged by enemies.

This would support massive switch to tolerance (simple survival of the fittest).

It also supports the spread, as a bacteria or virus would not have made it out of the "islands" (himalayas, oceans) and so tolerance wouldn't have been an advantage.

Does anyone know why some East Asians (such as myself) are lactose tolerant? Is that evidence of interbreeding in the past?

The article itself says >Two hundred thousand years later, around 10,000 B.C., this began to change. A genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position.

This is NOT a genetic mutation. The gene was already there but not turned on past the toddler years. I searched this entire page of comments and no one knows or points this out?

Because the dairy industry in the US alone gets $4 billion per year in subsidies from taxpayers?