Teat Time: Cow Milk Drinking Began 7,500 Years Ago

Calvin and Hobbes was often good for some serious laughs; one of my personal favorite C&H moments was served up by the middle two panels of one of Bill Watterson's many wonderful strips in which Calvin asks, rhetorically: why is it that we drink milk from a cow? And who the heck was it that first looked at a cow's udders with determination to drink what came out of them?

The scientific method isn't quite up to the task of determining exactly who that person was. But it has determined that whomever it was Calvin was asking about, we now know when and where the person lived.

As reported at UPI, and in reference to a new study published at PLoS, a team of scientists incorporating data from genetics and archaeology has determined that the genetic adaptations that enabled digestion of lactose appeared in early human communities in central Europe, in the region covering parts of the modern-day Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia and a handful of other nations.

Traces of fats uncovered through archaeological finds had suggested that dairy food consumption arose with the advent of dairy animal husbandry in what is now the U.K. about 6,000 years ago. However, spatial modeling of the genetic mutations required to process dairy foods indicate that the human species developed the ability to process milk without becoming sick about 1,500 years prior, and about a thousand miles away.

Photo courtesy of German Federal Archive, via Wikimedia Commons