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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

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."

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

> 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.

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