4 ms·

People ate cheese before they drank milk. I can't look up the source right now, but the gist of it was that cheese and yogurt are older than lactose tolerance i

• kevinmchugh 7y ago
  This is surprising for a couple reasons. It's easy to imagine the invention of cheese or yogurt if you assume people were already consuming milk. Wine and malting were invented under similar circumstances - fermentation of something already consumed. If humans weren't drinking milk, why'd they have it sitting around in containers? Second, modern lactose-intolerant humans can drink on average about a cup of milk without major issues - so even before widespread lactose tolerance, some amount of milk would still be useful. Further, wouldn't children have been tolerant of lactose even before adults gained that ability? Human milk is more lactose dense than that of any dairy animal (especially the sheep and goats we probably domesticated first). On Food And Cooking (my source for everything here) puts domestication of sheep and goats between 9000 and 8000 BCE, milk consumption known to exist between 5000 and 4000 BCE, and cheese production around 2500.
• usrusr 7y ago
  Adult lactose tolerance might be relatively new, but at what age is the intolerance switch usually flipped in humans that lack that specific gene? If it's more in the puberty range than toddler age then pre-mutation groups would have plenty of use for animal milk despite every individual eventually growing out of it. "Certain storage/transport containers make the child-drink palatable for old persons" would be very discoverable.