Archaeology: The milk revolution

Nature ^ | 7-31-2013 | Andrew Curry

[Renfield]

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw.

Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,” says Bogucki, now at Princeton University in New Jersey. He had seen something similar at a friend's house that was used for straining cheese, so he speculated that the pottery might be connected with cheese-making. But he had no way to test his idea.

The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world...

[Renfield]

[Renfield]

Ping

[fulltlt]

What does 7,000 year old cheese taste like?

[Moltke]

Well, anyone can drink milk...just what happens afterward varies.

[RJS1950]

Take your pick. 7,000 yo gouda, swiss, blue cheese? Let your imagination run wild. LOL

[Standing Wolf]

Truly fascinating stuff!

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

There are very few people however, who can’t eat cheese.

[chesley]

What does 7,000 year old cheese taste like?

Tastes like Limburger smells; and it stays around for a loooooong time :)

[bgill]

Lactose, the sugars in milk, can't be broken down by many adults, hence lactose intolerance.

Lactose is broken down and converted into lactic acid when bacteria is introduced such with yogurt and sour cream. People can usually eat yogurt without any problems.

Cheese tolerance is somewhere in the middle.

[Sherman Logan]

I never understood this one. The Mongols and similar peoples are shown as being largely lactose-intolerant by the map, yet we all know they were historically largely dependent on milk for food.

[afraidfortherepublic]

[Sherman Logan]

The Mongols largely used mare’s milk. I wonder how its lactose concentration differs from that of cows.

[Renfield]

They made the milk into yogurt, which is much lower in lactose than milk.

[Renfield]

In the case of the mare’s milk, it was fermented into something akin to slightly alcoholic buttermilk, called “kumis”.

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

[headsonpikes]

A similar product made from goat’s milk is a big hit among the locals where I live.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Lots of twists and turns to this.

The African Maasai tribe consume a lot of cow’s milk, often mixed with cow’s blood. I have no idea about what if any chemical interaction between the two fluids is, or if the blood breaks down lactose.

The Roman legions went great distances with hard cheese, which is one of the few primitive foods, like pemmican, that travel well. If you don’t have such a food, your travel is dependent on game animals, which for a large number of people is unlikely.

At least by the days of the republic, they were also big consumers of meat and grain, enough so that orders were issued that meat had to be either boiled or roasted.

[Sherman Logan]

Boy, that sounds really good. /s

[Mr Radical]

There’s something bugging me about that map of the world. I think there’s something missing, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is . . .

[Mr Radical]

To anyone who hasn't read the comments to the original article (and the "Dairy Diaspora" graphic), I must quote this one from "L B":

This is standard leftist propaganda that if it can't be "Out of Africa" it has to "Out of the Middle East". Nothing can evolve in (or expand out of) ancient Europe, and in fact ancient Europeans never even really existed, Europe has only ever been a "destination for immigrants". It's been proven that modern (Northern) Europeans are not primarily descended from the small number of Anatolian farmers who shifted their habitat up the Danube during the mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum. (Which incidentally, on the subject of leftist propaganda, was so much warmer than today that Denmark had a Mediterranean climate.) And the signature characteristic of adult lactase persistence in Europe is its identifiability with the blond Nordic type. The blonder you are, not the more Middle Eastern looking you are, the more likely you are to have it. So who are these blonds? Where did they come from? When did they get their hair and eye color? Where did they get those giant ultra-modern skulls and that microcephalin haplogroup D gene for larger brain size from? Where did they really spend the last glacial maximum -- are they the Iberians showing up in Morocco 30,000 years ago? When and by what routes did they re-populate the North Sea/Baltic region? How did they get down to the Ukraine for the Indo-European expansion 5000 years ago? That little bit of background context is needed, before we can ask when, where, and how did they become lactase-persistent, and how did this characteristic spread through Europe, and down to India with their chariots. A background context the Left is working full time today to erase from history -- in advance of the final erasure of its subjects as well.

[Defiant]

Did SunkenCiv authorize this post?