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Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk
- ed_elliott_asc 6y agoI know this because my kids watch horrible histories. My kids know more about history than I learnt at school by watching horrible histories. Primary school history lessons should watch all the horrible histories, they really are great at teaching kids.
- seibelj 6y agoI believe school should mostly be help with what is currently deemed “homework” and homework should consist of watching lectures, interesting videos, etc. from the incredible plethora of existing content that is superb. No individual teacher could ever create lessons as good as those (plus it’s exhausting). Teaching is backwards and hasn’t evolved in 100 years!
- eloff 6y agoYes, the educational system is about two standard deviations worse than a private tutor. There's a name for this effect, but I don't remember it. As someone who was homeschooled, I'll do that for my children as well, and I hope I will be able to afford a tutor to assist with that. I've had no difficulty in life competing with people who went through the public school system, and I want my kids to have the same advantage. And that's before thinking about the people whose lives were ruined by the influences of their peers, by the bullying, the drugs, or the teen pregnancy. Some of those people who went to my school, before I switched to homeschooling, are no longer among the living.
- jaynetics 6y agoIt seems your school really sucked, and not just with regards to learning as most schools seem to do. For many people, though, school is also a source of lifelong friendships, romance, and other good things.
- seibelj 6y agoTrue - and I think schools can enable this and teach knowledge in vastly superior ways.
- dijit 6y agoI’m sure my experience with school is not unique. School was a prison, quite literally a mandatory daycare service which as a side project may have taught some kids. But really, I’m 30 now. I look back in awe that we subject our kids to this. The friendships you forge would happen without being in prison.
- andai 6y agoI used to compare school to daycare, until I realized that is too generous. At daycare they let you do whatever you want, play, explore, socialize, read. The toilets are available at all times. School was quite a step down from daycare.
- eloff 6y agoUniversity was more like that. School was a prison.
- sterlind 6y agoI didn't get the best education in public school - though I made up for it in college - but I did grow up with friends in vastly-different socioeconomic status than my own. There's a tragedy of the commons here: parents who can afford private schools and tutors for their kids set them up for more success, but it also saps funding for public schools and families that can't afford that. (Public education would be better funded and higher quality if rich families had a reason to care.) Basically, white flight, though more tilted towards class now than race. I want to send my kids to public school, but I know my individual actions wouldn't do much to fix the inequality.
- golergka 6y agoYou're exercising your free choice between well-being of your own children and the community at large — and people who choose private tutors make their choice as well. It's great that people have that choice of how to use the money they earned.
- shawnz 6y agoWhat's great about it? Is it great because it makes the world a better place? Seems like the opposite might be true if capitalizing on the choice to use private education creates a less educated population in general
- jodrellblank 6y ago> "There's a name for this effect, but I don't remember it." It's Bloom's 2-sigma problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem > "Bloom concluded that one-to-one tutoring is "too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale", Bloom conjectured that a combination of two or three altered variables may result in a similar performance improvement."; that was in 1984. My suggestion for this is join a small but active Discord/Slack/IRC group, ask many questions and strive to answer any you can. I wonder if that has been studied, it's not structured, directed, one-to-one tutoring but many moments of one-to-one and many-to-one explaining and helping do happen within it.
- eloff 6y agoThanks, that's the one I was thinking of. Your suggestion was part of the process through which I taught myself computer programming. I think it has merit.
- lbotos 6y agoThis model is known as "flipped classroom" where students self-study video lectures on topics outside of the class, and during class time, the teacher fills in specific knowledge gaps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom I agree, it's very much the future (if we ever get there).
- watwut 6y agoOur teachers tended to try that. Result - nobody read that except most disciplined individuals who skimmed the texts. I think the results with videos would be the same. The experiment was reproduced the same way in elementary school, high school and college. Readings are skipped unless you have to give the teacher something. But most importantly, it is absurd to make this into a "system". The teachers can do mix of activities in school and homework can be mix of activities. There is zero reason to decide for one place for each activity, put name on it and then demand compliance. Teachers help is necessary at times, then again students doing individual work and problem solving with no help is important in reasonable doses too.
- aeontech 6y agoThanks for the recommendation, this seems awesome :)
- Smaug123 6y agoMore generally, the "Horrible Science" and "Horrible Histories" (and the first "Murderous Maths" book, though I never read the others) books taught me much more than I ever learned in primary school and the first several years of secondary school.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoIt doesn't really surprise me much that lactase persistence should be so strongly selected for in a relatively short period of time. Cows and other ungulates possess a rather magical ability to turn something that can't be digested by humans (cellulose) into something that can (milk). Opening up the huge caloric and nutrient resource of cellulose to humans in a relatively replenishable way had to be a giant benefit to those who could digest milk.
- lordnacho 6y agoIf it's so powerful, why did it not take over the rest of the world, or at least the rest of Eurasia? You'd think just a few people having kids with foreign populations would make the gene conquer the whole planet? They had cows in other places as well, right? 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?
- grawprog 6y ago>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. 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?
- srtjstjsj 6y agoCheese has about the same lactose as milk, doesn't it?
- guerby 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence Probably will be updated :)
- Falkon1313 6y agoIt was already known to be a very recently-developed mutation, so that's not that surprising. It might pin it down a bit more, and it is interesting that it indicates that it spread so quickly in the first couple of thousand years. Because so many people are still not lactase persistent, it is still possible to see how much that changes over time and the change might be noticeable over a relatively few generations.
- jonplackett 6y agoConsidering how obsessed we are with giving milk to kids because it’s so healthy, it doesn’t seem that crazy it would be a massive advantage to be able to drink it.
- kristopolous 6y agoI'm somewhere between 100 and 100% sure that perception was manufactured by dairy industry marketing. It was a classic bernays strategy, create the perception that everyone is doing it than everyone will do it. The same strategy used to get people to both start and stop smoking 60 years later
- laumars 6y ago...and why we give diamond rings as an engagement token.
- ardit33 6y agothat's not a correct point of view. Your theory would be valid, if this didn't happen in other european countries that had no marketing whatsoever or 'evil big milk' industry behind.... Almost all former communist countries, gave lots of milk of children, whenever they could as it was universally considered healthy and nutritional. Also Milk, yogurt and cheese are staples of most Mediterranean diets, since like forever.
- davchana 6y agoIndia too, have milk & its products as a major part of diet since millions of years. All the historical & mythological literature literally says Cow as a tree which gives life, so most of the time being called as Cow-mother. Kids of few hours to people almost near end of their life & everybody between uses milk. About till 20 years ago, many pet dogs & cats & their kids too were fed milk. Buffalo milk is denser & thus more easily available as well as nets more money per liter as compared to cow. As a kid, in 1990, I remember the preference was Buffalo Milk, if not then cow, if not then goat milk (not available everywhere), if not then camel or sheep milk (both very rarely available). Lactose intolerance has got its name only in last 20-30 years, before that it was commonly unaware of, same as peanut allergies are now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- austincheney 6y agoBy the time Germans became familiar to the Romans milk consumption was common. The common source of dietary fats for Romans at the time was olive oil. The common source of fats for the Germans was butter which the Romans looked down upon as barbaric.
- ardit33 6y agoGreeks did use butter, but not milk. But Illyrians, (northern neighbors, in modern day Albania) did drink milk. At some point they were invaded/incorporated by the Roman empire, and about 190 B.c. 'drinking milk' was not such a unfathomed thing. (but, albeit, might have been not a 'aristocratic' thing to do). http://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/PLACES/Adriatic/Illyrians-Wilkes1996.pdf http://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Docum... So, romans didn't drink milk originally, but their neighbors across the sea did.
- 082349872349872 6y ago"All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part that cooks with olive oil, and the part that cooks with butter."
- axaxs 6y agoBarbaric didn't have the same meaning then as now. To the latin speakers, they made fun of the Germans as sounding like 'Bar Bar' when they talked, hence Barbarians. To call something 'Barbaric' in those times simply meant Germanic.
- BurningFrog 6y agoSo, bigger picture, if we have the full DNA for people 3000 years old, we can get just as much from it as 23andMe can today or 10 years from now. Everything from hair color, personality type, addiction potential etc and so on. The lactose thing is a very tiny tip of a huge iceberg of ancestor knowledge!
- btilly 6y agoMy favorite theory for the development of lactose tolerance is that drinking fresh milk offers protection from smallpox. As a sanity check, http://books.google.com/books?id=GyE8Qt-kS1kC&pg=PA151&dq=&lr=&hl=en&cd=23#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=GyE8Qt-kS1kC&pg=PA151&dq=&l... includes an estimate that approximately 10% of children in the 1700s died from smallpox. The first successful smallpox vaccine was made from cows. And the inspiration for the vaccine was the realization that the reason why milkmaids had good complexions was that something about their job gave them some level of protection against smallpox. In mammals of all kinds, including humans and cows, milk delivers antibodies to protect babies. Therefore having fresh milk, and the fresher the better, provides protection from smallpox. This both helps survival and, as was apparent in the complexions of the milkmaids, resulted in more attractive adults. There you have a very strong selection pressure to be able to drink fresh milk.
- ByteJockey 6y agoWasn't the theory not that milk provides protection from smallpox, but proximity to cows transmits cowpox, which itself provides protection from small pox? Then again, in a world where >95% of people are farmers and there's no refrigeration (so milk has to be consumed fast), I'm not sure the difference between handling cows and drinking milk is much of a difference.
- perl4ever 6y agoThis seems like kind of a tunnel vision outlook from knowing one particular bit of trivia. Have you heard of bovine tuberculosis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_bovis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_bovis The reason it comes to mind is not because I've ever been near a farm, but I was just reading a collection of letters by a writer in the late 1940s, who had a small farm on an island. He was dying very slowly of tuberculosis (it seems implied people didn't distinguish between regular TB and bovine) and he mentions wanting to get a cow, but one that's been tested for TB to make sure his son doesn't get sick like him. Because humans can and do catch it from cows. There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brucellosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brucellosis which you get from unpasteurized milk. Our ancestors had a lot of experiences that are obscure now.
- greesil 6y agoIsn't the sample size a little small to draw conclusions about a whole continent?
- bra-ket 6y agoprobably because of famine periods during those thousands of years, more people survived who could digest milk, thus selecting for that gene
- shadowmore 6y agoThis seems somehow relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTp4kELkSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTp4kELkSY
- jmnicolas 6y agoWhy do they assume constant genetic bracing at that era, but these tribes could have been isolated and thus not gotten the gene. Secondly, does not having the gene make drinking milk impossible? I'm pretty sure that when starving anything would go.
- bobobob420 6y agoIndians (or people present in common day india-pakistan-nepal) were drinking milk before 5500 BC..makes you wonder. And most of that was fermented (cheese (paneer) and yogurt). Makes you wonder if the fermentation made it easier to eat and helped developed the gene.
- WalterBright 6y agoI heard on a documentary that definitely cheese was more digestible than milk, and helped to popularize cheese with populations that couldn't digest milk.
- sumedh 6y agoLot Indians are lactose intolerant which is weird if they have been drinking milk for thousands of years.
- valarauko 6y agoDo you have a source for the IVC use of milk? I'm not familiar with any direct evidence that the IVC consumed milk or milk products. They did rear animals that can be milked, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the IVC used them for milk rather than meat. The lactase persistence variant found in India, 13910T, is the same as prevalent in Europe, and likely arrived with Steppe pastoralists - after the fall of the Indus Valley Civilization. If the IVC had widespread lactase persistence mutations developing independently of the Steppe, you'd expect other variants to show up in the population, but it doesn't. Lactase persistence in India also closely tracks Steppe ancestry, suggestive that the IVC were largely lactose intolerant. They did have significant cattle, and were the birthplace of Zebu cattle domestication.
- ycombinete 6y agoThe fermentation process involves bacteria consuming the lactose in the milk. This makes the milk products easier to digest for people who are lactose intolerant
- stefantalpalaru 6y ago"DNA has a 521-year half-life" - https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555 https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1... "As a result of the fermentation, very little lactose remains in kefir." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir
- tiku 6y agoHow fast is it lost? How many generations? And how fast is it gained..
- edumucelli 6y agoGood for them, they would avoid prostate cancer [1], breast cancer [2] and weaker bones [3] ... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6683061/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6683061/ [2] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/925896 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/925896 [3] https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/milk-may-be-linked-to-bone-fractures-and-early-death/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/milk-may-be-linked-to-...
- ath92 6y agoLiterally in the abstract of the first article you posted: Consumption of total, individual, or subgroups of dairy products was not statistically significantly associated with prostate cancer risk overall (HR = 1.05, 95% CI = 0.96–1.15 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) or stratified by severity, except for regular-fat dairy product intake with late-stage prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.37, 95% CI = 1.04–1.82 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) and 2%-fat milk intake with advanced prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.02–1.28 comparing the higher than median intake with no intake group). Our findings do not support the previously reported harmful impact of dairy consumption on overall prostate cancer risk among men in the United States. The second article mentions the following with regards to bone fractures correlating with dairy consumption: "this correlation may not be causal and might be due to confounding by factors such as vitamin D status and ethnicity"
- lostlogin 6y agoThose are some soft findings, even by the standard of any diet related science. The second two links are on very specific populations (which they note) and may not be relevant to a wider population. The prostate cancer/milk connection is not made in that link and it states “In conclusion, in this prospective analysis, dairy product consumption was not associated with prostate cancer overall, which does not support the harmful impact of dairy products on prostate cancer reported in previous studies”.
- feintruled 6y agoInteresting factoid about lactose tolerance and geography - in Ireland we are big milk drinkers. Growing up I hadn't even heard of anyone being intolerant. And indeed Ireland has the lowest incidence in the world: https://milk.procon.org/lactose-intolerance-by-country/ https://milk.procon.org/lactose-intolerance-by-country/ I wonder how this came to be?
- gostsamo 6y agoI'd bet on poor soil, cold climate, and isolation. If the earth is not high quality and if the summer is not long enough for high yield per square meter, then you need animals to turn grass in to food. You can't eat too many of your animals for the same reason you can't buy grains from outside - it is expensive and you have too little to offer as export goods.
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- AdrianB1 6y agoMy grandfather's family were all lactose intolerant (missing the mutation). They lived in a mountain area where raising cows was one the main food resource, so dairy product were practically present in almost every meal. 2 generations later I am the only one missing the mutation in my generation, everyone else has it (dozens on cousins). It seems that a combination of 2 parents where 1 has the mutation and 1 is missing it results in most of the children inheriting the mutation. That explains the fast "conversion".
- bad_user 6y agoMilk is great. Milk + potatoes is a full diet. Not many mutations have spread as fast as lactose tolerance in adulthood, and we don’t have many known adaptations that happened in the neolithic. Goes to show the intense evolutionary pressure for drinking milk in Europe.