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.
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.
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.
There is also enough edible meat that cannot be preserved: the head, some organs. These are prepared immediately, hence the feast for the village.
I think most prehistoric settlements were small. Around where I live, perhaps 5-20 houses.
"cheptel" (french) / cattle / capital seem to derive from "caput" / "capita" latin for head(s)
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. "
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."
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.
Selecting for milk production would be a lot more accurate than selecting for meat tastiness, longevity or even, to an lesser extent, health.
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.
1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/cow-blood-kenya-maasai
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.
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.
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...
According to this link posted below [1], Montenegro and Albania are in the top 10 for milk consumption per capita.
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...
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.
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
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...
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.
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?
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.
(Though to be sure, lard was the cooking fat of choice in much but not all of the world.)
Fat was inaccessible for cooking on a day to day basis, for anyone but the rich, until the introduction of seed oils.
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 climate. Milk was an advantage against other food sources available at the time in northern Europe, but this wasn't necessarily true elsewhere.
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.
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?
Not as important today, but more important back then: aging your cheese also concentrates the salt. Salty foods are tasty.
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.
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
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...
Cattle are not always found in other places.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria
Bacteria have much shorter generations and this facilitates rapid evolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.