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.