8 ms·

Archaeology: The milk revolution

117 points by yread 13y ago

bausson 13y ago
I think I've already seen that link around here. Still a very good read for those who didn't. I love how this little plus provide in the long run an overwhelming advantage.
- m_mueller 13y ago
  You can simulate this -sort of- by playing Age of Empires. In this game, the civilizations are pretty much the same, except for small bonuses here and there - yet their play style often differs a lot, as in the successful strategies are wildly different. Small bonuses can mean a lot in a game of life.
jdmitch 13y ago
The article ignored the emergence of lactase persistence in West Africa and Saudi Arabia (where two other hotspots on the map are) but there is more on that in this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672153/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672153/
chime 13y ago
The map of Lactase Hotspots is pretty interesting. My family comes from the State of Gujarat in India, one of the darker (70%+) regions in the map. The "White Revolution"[1] was started in the 70s by independent dairy farmers in the district our village belongs to. The Gujarati and neighboring Rajasthani diet has always included milk and byproducts as a significant ingredient. The 3m+ milk producers supplying milk to the dairy cooperative Amul [2] have made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. I highly doubt this would've happened if the region was 30%-40% dark like the rest of India. Similar to how presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline [3], this small genetic mutation has affected the entire world's economy, especially agriculture-based industries. Once we enter the post-natural-selection era where we can select the DNA of our offspring, I wonder how different will the long-term future be. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution_(India) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution_(India) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul [3] http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/ http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-ar...
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"But lactase persistence also took root in sunny Spain, casting vitamin D's role into doubt." Well, Spain is not entirely sunny. Certainly the north of Spain is not. You can see a darker line in the map that divides Spain. This is divided by a set of mountains called "Cordillera cantábrica" that makes the north way more rainy than the rest of Spain. There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year. Most of the year is sunny there(the part that is not the north).
- coldarchon 13y ago
  Actually it is pretty well proven that milk was mainly used as dietary supplement for calcium and potassium, not vitamin D. Vegetables in northern Europe had thinner leaves because of frosty winters (we are speaking of a pre-domestication age) so the ice crystals inside of the leaves wouldn't destroy the plant. But humans get calcium and potassium mainly from thick leaves of vegetables. And that's why milk as food spread out so fast in densely habitable parts of Europe, while in sparsely populated areas there was enough meat.
- petemc_ 13y ago
  So the rain in Spain doesn't stay mainly in the plain?
- narag 13y ago
  There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year. Last time I looked, Cádiz (in the very south of the peninsula) is the province with more yearly rain, also one of the sunniest. That's because it's in the straigth between Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The (not very high, just about 1km height) mountains capture a lot of humidity. And no, it's not a matter of "a small period of the year", but of a small portion of the province: Sierra of Grazalema. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazalema http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazalema
contingencies 13y ago
There's some pretty vicious comments on that article! Personally I am mostly interested in Asian history. We know that South Asian and Tibeto-Burman people have been milk and cheese consumers for a long time, as have the Central Asian peoples including the Mongols, who are said to have actually preferred liquid foods to solid ones. These days, I know first hand that a lot of people in China are getting stuck in to milk products for the first time. How can this be, if they should keel over in pain and indigestive flatulence? The only person I've ever seen mass-produce cheese in an apartment was a Burmese friend in China, who I'm sure wasn't after the lactose for its apparent usefulness in diluting heroin! Wikipedia states: Some studies indicate that environmental factors—more specifically, the consumption of lactose—may "play a more important role than genetic factors in the etio-pathogenesis of milk intolerance" ... ie. the intolerance notion is largely bullshit and people can adapt to lactose. That seems to fit the observations. Anyway, interesting to ponder... I went and polished off a block of New Zealand cheddar to celebrate. (Saving Roquefort for a salad tomorrow, then it's off to Indonesia where cheese is no doubt harder to find!)
nkoren 13y ago
Fascinating true(?) story about how lactose intolerance changed the course of history, as recorded in the ancient sagas[1]: When the Vikings established their colony in Vinland, they wished to establish peaceable relations with the Native Americans. They invited the local chiefs to a party at their longhouse, in which they served an amazing new drink -- milk -- which the Americans had never seen before. The following morning, suffering from intense abdominal pains, the natives accused the vikings of trying to poison them, and promptly laid siege to the colony until the Vikings packed up and buggered off. But for this incident, it's entirely possible that the Vikings might have established a durable colony in the Americas, leading to contact between the old and new world 500 years earlier. 1: http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/1009811 http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/1009811
- BlobbleBlab 13y ago
  Fascinating, but it doesn't stand up to a few minutes of googling: http://www.editors-wastebasket.org/nexx/pro/vinland.html http://www.editors-wastebasket.org/nexx/pro/vinland.html "What drove the two groups apart was a killing. Some of the Norse men killed a skraeling who was attempting to steal weapons, which Thorfinn had forbidden as trade items." The Skraelings, being mammals, and observers of other mammals such animals they hunted, would have been familiar with milk, even without owning livestock. If they bought raw milk, they probably intended to use it for their children, but it seems a rather difficult trade item, as a liquid, and having a shelf life of only a day or two. They probably were trading butter or cheese, neither of which contains enough lactose to cause problems. Fresh cheese would have been known from the stomachs of suckling animals, and might have been a prized delicacy before they were aware it could be manufactured. Butter would have been completely new to them.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    > They probably were trading butter or cheese, neither of which contains enough lactose to cause problems. I am lactose tolerant; I can assure you that cheese contains enough lactose to cause problems.
petercooper 13y ago
I became lactose intolerant at the age of 30 with all the described accompanying 'issues'. It took 6 months to work it out though as it was so sudden and I'd consumed milk frequently up until then. Curiously, though, both of my daughters are lactose intolerant, so it seems something weird gene-wise was going on there..
- hollerith 13y ago
  The cause is much more likely changes in the microflora of your gut than your genes. (The human-lactase persistence allele is only one tiny part of the total picture.) Lactose sometimes feeds bad microbes (because the microbes can use the di-saccharide bond for energy or because the the di-saccharide bond delays the absorption of the sugar, allowing it to feed bacteria residing in parts of the gut where starches and simple sugars are absent because they've already been absorbed upstream.) In addition, microbes can produce toxins that interfere with the production or the effectiveness of the enzymes that cleave the di-saccharide bond. The practical application of what I just said is that you might be able to regain your lactose tolerance by scrupulously avoiding lactose for a few months or a few years (i.e., long enough to starve out the offending microbial species). A good pro-biotic supplement might help.
samuel 13y ago
Project LeChe, great name!! Leche is the spanish word for milk.
amalag 13y ago
What load of bullshit. It does not even mention pasteurization. As most of the uninformed comments on this page as well. As a comment rightly notes: Raw milk contains lactase producing bacteria, so anyone consuming milk in its raw form would be able to digest it without any digestion problems. Only pasteurized milk is lactase free as heating destroys the bacteria that produce the enzyme. Most milk historically would have been consumed raw so an adaptation to produce lactase would have been unnecessary and would not provide a significant competitive advantage.
- derleth 13y ago
  It's amazing how quickly that claim falls to basic research: http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/BuyStoreServeSafeFood/ucm247991.htm http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/BuyStor... > Probiotic microorganisms must be of human origin in order to have an impact on human health (Teitelbaum and Walker, 2000). Bacteria present in raw milk are from infected udder tissues (e.g., mastitis causing bacteria), the dairy environment (e.g., soil, water, and cow manure), and milking equipment. High bacteria counts in raw milk only indicate poor animal health and poor farm hygiene. > Bacteria in raw milk are typically not of human origin. An exception is Streptococcus pyogenes. S. pyogenes that has adapted to humans can be transmitted to animals. Once S. pyogenes is colonized in animals, it can be re-transmitted to humans as a human pathogen that causes strep throat. For example, S. pyogenes can infect a cow udder to cause mastitis. The infected cow udder can subsequently shed S. pyogenes, a pathogen, into raw milk. This is one reason many people are wary of 'raw milk': People lie to promote it. They tell bald-faced lies, and they expect people won't check up on them. And then they spin conspiracy theories when someone does check up on them and call them on their lies. It's just cynical advertising from an industry that uses fear to sell its wares.
  - VLM 13y ago
    His claim is basically true that (pure, uninfected) raw milk is better for you than regular milk. Good luck being able to buy pure uninfected raw milk. I suppose its the hand of Darwin striking down the gullible, and/or the children of the gullible. His lie is more by omission in that its a fairly idiotic way to obtain nutrition. If you must drink something unhealthy try corn syrup soda, or fruit juice, might make you unhealthy in the long run but at least probably not infected. The best comparison is by analogy in that a raw bratwurst will provide you with a tiny delta better nutrition than a cooked bratwurst. There seems to be no way to successfully argue it isn't better. Although you'd have to be some kind of idiot to eat a raw bratwurst other than some kind of MTV "jackass" tv show stunt to see just how badly you can food poison yourself and still survive.
VLM 13y ago
Just last night I was reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David Anthony and I was around the part of the book describing the lactose mutation and its spread across the world etc. Pre-historic time is pretty complicated, and interesting. Its a fairly academic book oriented more toward the spread of proto-indo-european language and related topics. And I got the pointer to that book from a podcast delivered lecture series "WS3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period" a tolerable recording (tolerable from a technical standpoint; OK to listen to, but not going to win any awards for audio engineering). Its a recording of a class at Columbia from 2008. My interpretation of the book and lecture series is people kept livestock for quite a long time before some mutant gained the ability to drink milk, which given the herd of meat animals meant they gained a lot of nutrition compared to the non-mutants, which is a huge survival gain. I've found I enjoy university lectures much more now that I don't need to take midterms and write papers, so thats pretty much all I listen to.
DiabloD3 13y ago
As a reminder, milk isn't paleo.
- joemaller1 13y ago
  If you've got an LP allele, neither are you.
losethos 13y ago
Do you realize all the nonmilk people had to die? Basically, no other evolution could take place while God made all the nonmilk people die. Evolution looks fucked-up without God. God says... C:\TAD\Text\WEALTH.TXT gly, the further exportation of corn was prohibited for nine months. There was a third event which occurred in the course of the same period, and which, though it could not occasion any scarcity of corn, nor, perhaps, any augmentation in the real quantity of silver which was usually paid for it, must necessarily have occasioned some augmentation in the nominal sum. This event was the great debasement of the silver coin, by clipping and wearing. This evil had begun in the reign of Charles II. and ---- Milk help teef.

117 points by yread 13y ago

I think I've already seen that link around here. Still a very good read for those who didn't. I love how this little plus provide in the long run an overwhelming advantage.

m_mueller 13y ago
You can simulate this -sort of- by playing Age of Empires. In this game, the civilizations are pretty much the same, except for small bonuses here and there - yet their play style often differs a lot, as in the successful strategies are wildly different. Small bonuses can mean a lot in a game of life.

jdmitch 13y ago

The article ignored the emergence of lactase persistence in West Africa and Saudi Arabia (where two other hotspots on the map are) but there is more on that in this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672153/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672153/

chime 13y ago

The map of Lactase Hotspots is pretty interesting. My family comes from the State of Gujarat in India, one of the darker (70%+) regions in the map. The "White Revolution"[1] was started in the 70s by independent dairy farmers in the district our village belongs to. The Gujarati and neighboring Rajasthani diet has always included milk and byproducts as a significant ingredient. The 3m+ milk producers supplying milk to the dairy cooperative Amul [2] have made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. I highly doubt this would've happened if the region was 30%-40% dark like the rest of India. Similar to how presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline [3], this small genetic mutation has affected the entire world's economy, especially agriculture-based industries. Once we enter the post-natural-selection era where we can select the DNA of our offspring, I wonder how different will the long-term future be. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution_(India) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution_(India) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul [3] http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/ http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-ar...

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"But lactase persistence also took root in sunny Spain, casting vitamin D's role into doubt." Well, Spain is not entirely sunny. Certainly the north of Spain is not. You can see a darker line in the map that divides Spain. This is divided by a set of mountains called "Cordillera cantábrica" that makes the north way more rainy than the rest of Spain. There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year. Most of the year is sunny there(the part that is not the north).

coldarchon 13y ago
Actually it is pretty well proven that milk was mainly used as dietary supplement for calcium and potassium, not vitamin D. Vegetables in northern Europe had thinner leaves because of frosty winters (we are speaking of a pre-domestication age) so the ice crystals inside of the leaves wouldn't destroy the plant. But humans get calcium and potassium mainly from thick leaves of vegetables. And that's why milk as food spread out so fast in densely habitable parts of Europe, while in sparsely populated areas there was enough meat.
petemc_ 13y ago
So the rain in Spain doesn't stay mainly in the plain?
narag 13y ago
There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year. Last time I looked, Cádiz (in the very south of the peninsula) is the province with more yearly rain, also one of the sunniest. That's because it's in the straigth between Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The (not very high, just about 1km height) mountains capture a lot of humidity. And no, it's not a matter of "a small period of the year", but of a small portion of the province: Sierra of Grazalema. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazalema http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazalema

contingencies 13y ago

There's some pretty vicious comments on that article! Personally I am mostly interested in Asian history. We know that South Asian and Tibeto-Burman people have been milk and cheese consumers for a long time, as have the Central Asian peoples including the Mongols, who are said to have actually preferred liquid foods to solid ones. These days, I know first hand that a lot of people in China are getting stuck in to milk products for the first time. How can this be, if they should keel over in pain and indigestive flatulence? The only person I've ever seen mass-produce cheese in an apartment was a Burmese friend in China, who I'm sure wasn't after the lactose for its apparent usefulness in diluting heroin! Wikipedia states: Some studies indicate that environmental factors—more specifically, the consumption of lactose—may "play a more important role than genetic factors in the etio-pathogenesis of milk intolerance" ... ie. the intolerance notion is largely bullshit and people can adapt to lactose. That seems to fit the observations. Anyway, interesting to ponder... I went and polished off a block of New Zealand cheddar to celebrate. (Saving Roquefort for a salad tomorrow, then it's off to Indonesia where cheese is no doubt harder to find!)

nkoren 13y ago

Fascinating true(?) story about how lactose intolerance changed the course of history, as recorded in the ancient sagas[1]: When the Vikings established their colony in Vinland, they wished to establish peaceable relations with the Native Americans. They invited the local chiefs to a party at their longhouse, in which they served an amazing new drink -- milk -- which the Americans had never seen before. The following morning, suffering from intense abdominal pains, the natives accused the vikings of trying to poison them, and promptly laid siege to the colony until the Vikings packed up and buggered off. But for this incident, it's entirely possible that the Vikings might have established a durable colony in the Americas, leading to contact between the old and new world 500 years earlier. 1: http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/1009811 http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/1009811

BlobbleBlab 13y ago
Fascinating, but it doesn't stand up to a few minutes of googling: http://www.editors-wastebasket.org/nexx/pro/vinland.html http://www.editors-wastebasket.org/nexx/pro/vinland.html "What drove the two groups apart was a killing. Some of the Norse men killed a skraeling who was attempting to steal weapons, which Thorfinn had forbidden as trade items." The Skraelings, being mammals, and observers of other mammals such animals they hunted, would have been familiar with milk, even without owning livestock. If they bought raw milk, they probably intended to use it for their children, but it seems a rather difficult trade item, as a liquid, and having a shelf life of only a day or two. They probably were trading butter or cheese, neither of which contains enough lactose to cause problems. Fresh cheese would have been known from the stomachs of suckling animals, and might have been a prized delicacy before they were aware it could be manufactured. Butter would have been completely new to them.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > They probably were trading butter or cheese, neither of which contains enough lactose to cause problems. I am lactose tolerant; I can assure you that cheese contains enough lactose to cause problems.

petercooper 13y ago

I became lactose intolerant at the age of 30 with all the described accompanying 'issues'. It took 6 months to work it out though as it was so sudden and I'd consumed milk frequently up until then. Curiously, though, both of my daughters are lactose intolerant, so it seems something weird gene-wise was going on there..

hollerith 13y ago
The cause is much more likely changes in the microflora of your gut than your genes. (The human-lactase persistence allele is only one tiny part of the total picture.) Lactose sometimes feeds bad microbes (because the microbes can use the di-saccharide bond for energy or because the the di-saccharide bond delays the absorption of the sugar, allowing it to feed bacteria residing in parts of the gut where starches and simple sugars are absent because they've already been absorbed upstream.) In addition, microbes can produce toxins that interfere with the production or the effectiveness of the enzymes that cleave the di-saccharide bond. The practical application of what I just said is that you might be able to regain your lactose tolerance by scrupulously avoiding lactose for a few months or a few years (i.e., long enough to starve out the offending microbial species). A good pro-biotic supplement might help.

samuel 13y ago

Project LeChe, great name!! Leche is the spanish word for milk.

amalag 13y ago

What load of bullshit. It does not even mention pasteurization. As most of the uninformed comments on this page as well. As a comment rightly notes: Raw milk contains lactase producing bacteria, so anyone consuming milk in its raw form would be able to digest it without any digestion problems. Only pasteurized milk is lactase free as heating destroys the bacteria that produce the enzyme. Most milk historically would have been consumed raw so an adaptation to produce lactase would have been unnecessary and would not provide a significant competitive advantage.

derleth 13y ago
It's amazing how quickly that claim falls to basic research: http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/BuyStoreServeSafeFood/ucm247991.htm http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/BuyStor... > Probiotic microorganisms must be of human origin in order to have an impact on human health (Teitelbaum and Walker, 2000). Bacteria present in raw milk are from infected udder tissues (e.g., mastitis causing bacteria), the dairy environment (e.g., soil, water, and cow manure), and milking equipment. High bacteria counts in raw milk only indicate poor animal health and poor farm hygiene. > Bacteria in raw milk are typically not of human origin. An exception is Streptococcus pyogenes. S. pyogenes that has adapted to humans can be transmitted to animals. Once S. pyogenes is colonized in animals, it can be re-transmitted to humans as a human pathogen that causes strep throat. For example, S. pyogenes can infect a cow udder to cause mastitis. The infected cow udder can subsequently shed S. pyogenes, a pathogen, into raw milk. This is one reason many people are wary of 'raw milk': People lie to promote it. They tell bald-faced lies, and they expect people won't check up on them. And then they spin conspiracy theories when someone does check up on them and call them on their lies. It's just cynical advertising from an industry that uses fear to sell its wares.
- VLM 13y ago
  His claim is basically true that (pure, uninfected) raw milk is better for you than regular milk. Good luck being able to buy pure uninfected raw milk. I suppose its the hand of Darwin striking down the gullible, and/or the children of the gullible. His lie is more by omission in that its a fairly idiotic way to obtain nutrition. If you must drink something unhealthy try corn syrup soda, or fruit juice, might make you unhealthy in the long run but at least probably not infected. The best comparison is by analogy in that a raw bratwurst will provide you with a tiny delta better nutrition than a cooked bratwurst. There seems to be no way to successfully argue it isn't better. Although you'd have to be some kind of idiot to eat a raw bratwurst other than some kind of MTV "jackass" tv show stunt to see just how badly you can food poison yourself and still survive.

VLM 13y ago

Just last night I was reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David Anthony and I was around the part of the book describing the lactose mutation and its spread across the world etc. Pre-historic time is pretty complicated, and interesting. Its a fairly academic book oriented more toward the spread of proto-indo-european language and related topics. And I got the pointer to that book from a podcast delivered lecture series "WS3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period" a tolerable recording (tolerable from a technical standpoint; OK to listen to, but not going to win any awards for audio engineering). Its a recording of a class at Columbia from 2008. My interpretation of the book and lecture series is people kept livestock for quite a long time before some mutant gained the ability to drink milk, which given the herd of meat animals meant they gained a lot of nutrition compared to the non-mutants, which is a huge survival gain. I've found I enjoy university lectures much more now that I don't need to take midterms and write papers, so thats pretty much all I listen to.

DiabloD3 13y ago

As a reminder, milk isn't paleo.

joemaller1 13y ago
If you've got an LP allele, neither are you.

losethos 13y ago

Do you realize all the nonmilk people had to die? Basically, no other evolution could take place while God made all the nonmilk people die. Evolution looks fucked-up without God. God says... C:\TAD\Text\WEALTH.TXT gly, the further exportation of corn was prohibited for nine months. There was a third event which occurred in the course of the same period, and which, though it could not occasion any scarcity of corn, nor, perhaps, any augmentation in the real quantity of silver which was usually paid for it, must necessarily have occasioned some augmentation in the nominal sum. This event was the great debasement of the silver coin, by clipping and wearing. This evil had begun in the reign of Charles II. and ---- Milk help teef.