
Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk - guerby
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-reveal-bronze-age-europeans-couldn-t-drink-milk
======
hn_throwaway_99
It 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
If 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?

~~~
Spooky23
Milk isn’t dairy. Because it’s a liability in many parts of the world without
abundant fodder or cold climate. Milk can be dangerous without refrigeration
in hours.

Dairy is much more than milk. You can consume cheese, yogurt, butter and many
other products where the process of making the dairy product eliminates
lactose. Think about things like cooking oil — an impossible thing to
manufacture efficiently if you lack the resources to grow oil crops and
process them. With diary, you just make butter, which is trivial to do.

Domesticated cows and dairy is a pretty miraculous thing. It’s a shame that
the excesses and poor practices around industrialized agriculture and economic
policy has made it a ethical problem for some people.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Lard was the "cooking oil" of choice before modern industrial production
shifted to seed oils.

~~~
eru
And it's still great.

(Though to be sure, lard was the cooking fat of choice in much but not all of
the world.)

------
ed_elliott_asc
I 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
I 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
Yes, 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
It 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.

~~~
dijit
I’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
I 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.

------
bobobob420
Indians (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.

~~~
valarauko
Do 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.

------
BurningFrog
So, 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!

------
feintruled
Interesting 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
I'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.

------
edumucelli
Good 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-...](https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/milk-may-be-linked-to-bone-
fractures-and-early-death/)

~~~
ath92
Literally 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"

------
jmnicolas
Why 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.

------
shadowmore
This seems somehow relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTp4kELkSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTp4kELkSY)

------
btilly
My 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=&l...](http://books.google.com/books?id=GyE8Qt-
kS1kC&pg=PA151&dq=&lr=&hl=en&cd=23#v=onepage&q&f=false) 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.

~~~
perl4ever
This 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.

~~~
082349872349872
Humans are also vectors for swine diseases:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMOPdUvKUwM&t=84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMOPdUvKUwM&t=84)

[https://porkgateway.org/resource/biosecurity-of-pigs-and-
far...](https://porkgateway.org/resource/biosecurity-of-pigs-and-farm-
security/)

------
austincheney
By 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.

~~~
axaxs
Barbaric 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.

~~~
mido22
Barbarian: word originated from the Greek, antonym for "citizen". The Greeks
used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian)

~~~
axaxs
Thanks for the correction and link, guess I should have refreshed on it before
commenting.

------
bad_user
Milk 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.

------
AdrianB1
My 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".

------
jonplackett
Considering 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
I'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

~~~
ardit33
that'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
India 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.

~~~
wtmt
> India too, have milk & its products as a major part of diet since _millions
> of years._

Citation needed on “millions of years.”

~~~
pm90
There is none, it’s “mythology” lol.

This absurd timeline is the result of a culture that portrays its faith as
fact, confusing children and adults alike. I remember learning timelines of
human civilizations at school and asking my parents about how certain
mythological events (eg from the Ramayana or Mahabharata) fit in that timeline
and heard some amazing rationalization or was summarily ignored depending on
the difficulty.

------
Falkon1313
It 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.

------
greesil
Isn't the sample size a little small to draw conclusions about a whole
continent?

------
guerby
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence)

Probably will be updated :)

------
tiku
How fast is it lost? How many generations? And how fast is it gained..

------
bra-ket
probably because of famine periods during those thousands of years, more
people survived who could digest milk, thus selecting for that gene

