8 ms·

Lactase persistence isn't the only (or even first) way to convert inedible flora into food. For one, you can simply eat the cows, the way it was done for most o

Lactase persistence isn't the only (or even first) way to convert inedible flora into food. For one, you can simply eat the cows, the way it was done for most of human history. If you absolutely insist on dairy though, the genes for lactase persistence post-date dairying by a few millennia and many people who rely primarily on dairy today still lack the genes, like most Mongolians. They've adapted different production methods and gut microbiota to take care of the issues.

pan69 6y ago
> For one, you can simply eat the cows 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.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Milk production is also a continuum of data samples over the life of the animal. Eating the animal is one data sample and you can’t duplicate the animal after collecting the data. Selecting for milk production would be a lot more accurate than selecting for meat tastiness, longevity or even, to an lesser extent, health.
  - solstice 6y ago
    I can't decide whether that first para is satire or not
  - simcop2387 6y ago
    Actually we select for both depending on the line of the stock and have been doing so for a rather long time. You do lose the animal after killing it of course but we have a huge amount data from cattle breeding charts that lets a branch be trimmed if there's some fault with it that will damage the genetic tree.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      You can’t use the lens of modern agriculture and data collection to look at the birth and growth of animal husbandry. 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.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Not denying it but in order for a cow to produce milk, it has to give birth to a calf every year. So you are getting new cows as a byproduct. 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.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    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.
    - smabie 6y ago
      It's relatively easy to preserve meat by making jerky or through fermentation. Cultures have known about these methods for a long long time.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Salting, drying and various other methods for preserving meat have been known for a long time.
      - rrobukef 6y ago
        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.
        rsj_hn 6y ago
        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.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  You could also harvest and consume the blood[1], without having to kill any cattle. 1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/cow-blood-kenya-maasai https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/cow-blood-kenya-maasai
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    This must be more dangerous disease transmission wise?
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      If you choose to consume the blood raw, then yes, it can be a vector for pathogens. However, most pastoralist societies know how to keep their herds healthy.
      - eru 6y ago
        That's for the vector from cow to human. But cutting into your cow also makes it more likely for your cow to catch something, doesn't it?
  - scns 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  Europe doesn't have the huge steppes that North America and North Asia had for unlimited and ever replenishing cattle.
Retric 6y ago
Milk is vastly more efficient than directly eating cows. It’s the same reason eggs are cheaper than eating chickens, compounded by an even longer lifespan.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  The comparison isn't between milk and not-milk. As I mentioned previously, you can eat dairy without lactase persistence. 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.
missing_paren 6y ago
> the way it was done for most of human history 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 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00545795/document
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  The paper you're linking does not support the conclusion you're drawing and I'd encourage you to read it more carefully. Modern humans are omnivores, which means their diet included both animal and plant products, though in different proportions at different times and places. 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_Acheulean_Industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool#Mode_II:_The_Acheul...
- msla 6y ago
  http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-out-monkeys http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-... 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/ 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.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190430091846.h... And, again, early humans hunted: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/ 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.
nyolfen 6y ago
mongolians are also atypically short for a population with a tradition of dairying, though — those with lactase persistence are among the tallest in the world thanks to the massive caloric surplus reducing environmental selection against height in times of scarcity
- cozos 6y ago
  that's an interesting theory ive never heard before. Is it generally accepted that Northern Europeans are taller because their society is less prone to famine?
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    It's relatively uncontroversial that contemporary European populations are among the tallest in the world broadly due to caloric surplus and generally good nutrition. 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-and-living-standards-affect-the-distribution-of-heights https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#how-does-environment...
    - hbarka 6y ago
      Yes, like the divergence between South vs North Korea in just a few generations.
      - treeman79 6y ago
        Or Japanese. Older ww2 Japanese are short. Their kids are a head above them.
restalis 6y ago
"For one, you can simply eat the cows, the way it was done for most of human history." 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

pan69 6y ago

> For one, you can simply eat the cows 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.

hinkley 6y ago
Milk production is also a continuum of data samples over the life of the animal. Eating the animal is one data sample and you can’t duplicate the animal after collecting the data. Selecting for milk production would be a lot more accurate than selecting for meat tastiness, longevity or even, to an lesser extent, health.
- solstice 6y ago
  I can't decide whether that first para is satire or not
- simcop2387 6y ago
  Actually we select for both depending on the line of the stock and have been doing so for a rather long time. You do lose the animal after killing it of course but we have a huge amount data from cattle breeding charts that lets a branch be trimmed if there's some fault with it that will damage the genetic tree.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    You can’t use the lens of modern agriculture and data collection to look at the birth and growth of animal husbandry. 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.
GuB-42 6y ago
Not denying it but in order for a cow to produce milk, it has to give birth to a calf every year. So you are getting new cows as a byproduct. 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.
- bluGill 6y ago
  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.
  - smabie 6y ago
    It's relatively easy to preserve meat by making jerky or through fermentation. Cultures have known about these methods for a long long time.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Salting, drying and various other methods for preserving meat have been known for a long time.
    - rrobukef 6y ago
      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.
      - rsj_hn 6y ago
        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.
sangnoir 6y ago
You could also harvest and consume the blood[1], without having to kill any cattle. 1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/cow-blood-kenya-maasai https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/cow-blood-kenya-maasai
- kaesar14 6y ago
  This must be more dangerous disease transmission wise?
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    If you choose to consume the blood raw, then yes, it can be a vector for pathogens. However, most pastoralist societies know how to keep their herds healthy.
    - eru 6y ago
      That's for the vector from cow to human. But cutting into your cow also makes it more likely for your cow to catch something, doesn't it?
- scns 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet
AniseAbyss 6y ago
Europe doesn't have the huge steppes that North America and North Asia had for unlimited and ever replenishing cattle.

Retric 6y ago

Milk is vastly more efficient than directly eating cows. It’s the same reason eggs are cheaper than eating chickens, compounded by an even longer lifespan.

AlotOfReading 6y ago
The comparison isn't between milk and not-milk. As I mentioned previously, you can eat dairy without lactase persistence. 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.

missing_paren 6y ago

> the way it was done for most of human history 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 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00545795/document

AlotOfReading 6y ago
The paper you're linking does not support the conclusion you're drawing and I'd encourage you to read it more carefully. Modern humans are omnivores, which means their diet included both animal and plant products, though in different proportions at different times and places. 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_Acheulean_Industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool#Mode_II:_The_Acheul...
msla 6y ago
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-out-monkeys http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-... 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/ 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.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190430091846.h... And, again, early humans hunted: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/ 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.

nyolfen 6y ago

mongolians are also atypically short for a population with a tradition of dairying, though — those with lactase persistence are among the tallest in the world thanks to the massive caloric surplus reducing environmental selection against height in times of scarcity

cozos 6y ago
that's an interesting theory ive never heard before. Is it generally accepted that Northern Europeans are taller because their society is less prone to famine?
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  It's relatively uncontroversial that contemporary European populations are among the tallest in the world broadly due to caloric surplus and generally good nutrition. 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-and-living-standards-affect-the-distribution-of-heights https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#how-does-environment...
  - hbarka 6y ago
    Yes, like the divergence between South vs North Korea in just a few generations.
    - treeman79 6y ago
      Or Japanese. Older ww2 Japanese are short. Their kids are a head above them.

restalis 6y ago

"For one, you can simply eat the cows, the way it was done for most of human history." 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]