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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY DID WE START DRINKING MILK? ON THE ANCIENT RISE OF DAIRY
CONSUMPTION  
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Anne Mendelson
January 9, 2025
Lithub
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_ In her book, “Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood,” Anne
Mendelson explores the prehistoric origins of nonhuman milk in our
diet. _

The family of plants called Grasses may be the most important reason
that nonhuman milk ever entered human diets., Columbia UniversityPress


 

When the last ice sheet had finished riding roughshod over large
tracts of the Northern Hemisphere and melted back to the Arctic
Circle, animals and plants beyond number began moving into available
ecological niches like so many Noah’s Flood survivors climbing out
of the ark and looking for anchoring spots. Many life forms found the
homes that suited their needs in or close to an immense east-west
stretch of open ground running from Manchuria to the Danube, or about
5,000 miles. Geographers call this vast sky-canopied expanse the Great
Steppe of Eurasia.

The Eurasian steppe resembles our New World counterpart, the North
American Great Plains, in being windswept and for the most part
semiarid, with fiercely cold winters and hot summers. But it is far
larger and has figured more dramatically in the global history of
food.

In places the Great Steppe is only about 200 miles wide from north to
south, in others more than 500 miles. To the north, it merges into
mixed forest-steppe terrain followed by tremendous boreal forests. To
the south, it borders some of the world’s most forbidding deserts.
Despite a few mountain barriers, it has always functioned as a natural
highway, or biological—and cultural—pipeline through which the
eastern and western edges of Asia have exchanged influences in more
dynamic and diverse ways than might seem possible to an observer
unexpectedly set down in these grass-clad wilds.

Grasses, or Poaceae to botanists, were the family of plants that most
dramatically seized the ecological initiative throughout the steppe as
the planet began warming up after the last glacial epoch. Along its
main body, river valleys and lake borders are almost the only places
with enough water to support tree growth. But grasses, with their
tough and many-branched roots, can make efficient use of limited
rainfall, the chief factor that always kept many other kinds of plants
from colonizing the sweeping corridor.

Grasses were the making of several complicated relationships between
people and their food along the Great Steppe and in some mountainous
areas abutting it. They may be the most important reason that nonhuman
milk ever entered human diets—starting with the fact that these
regions are, or until modern times were, ideal environments for
wandering herds of grass-eating animals. The herbivores in turn
attracted an array of predators unequipped to digest grass themselves
but able to profit from it in the flesh of nearby herbivores. The most
effective of all predators would be Homo sapiens.

The first stages on the path to the milking revolution emerged long
before milking as an actual practice. They started when Neolithic
peoples found that by usefully meddling in the reproductive cycles of
certain wild grasses and animals, they could create a cushion against
seasonal food shortages. The setting for these discoveries was a
well-watered swathe of West Asian terrain some 500 miles south of the
steppe, encompassing what is often dubbed the Fertile Crescent.

Researchers who study the beginnings of farming now map its earliest
centers not only in the originally identified Fertile Crescent—a
curving belt lying between the Zagros Mountains of modern Iran on the
east and the Taurus Mountains of Turkey on the west—but also in
several other sites of human activity farther west and south, on the
Anatolian Plateau and close to the Levantine coast of the
Mediterranean. These areas had their own scattered pieces of grassy
terrain that would figure lastingly in global foodways.

At some point close to 10,000 BC, local hunter-gatherers took note of
an important fact: not only would grasses that escaped being eaten by
animals eventually bear seeds, but some of the seeds in question were
worth searching out and collecting as food for humans.

Over an unknown number of centuries, people began encouraging likely
specimens to reseed themselves in one spot and ripen on a fairly
systematic schedule for easier gathering. At the same time, they
learned to single out individual plants with unusual qualities like
especially large seeds, or whole seed-heads that tended not to shatter
when ripe and (inconveniently, from a human viewpoint) spill the
contents on the ground before they could be efficiently harvested. By
degrees, a focus on such traits shaded into planned cultivation, which
in turn shaded into actual domestication.

There are various definitions of domestication, but all agree that it
replaces natural selection with artificial selection for qualities
desired by human custodians, eventually creating strains of
true-breeding descendants that can rarely survive in their altered
form without being planted, harvested, and maintained by people. The
earliest resulting plants in the greater Fertile Crescent were what
are now labeled cereal grasses or grain crops, ancestors of today’s
wheat and barley. The last centuries before 10,000 BC appear to have
seen the emergence of truly domesticated strains.

Meanwhile, the hunting sector of the Near Eastern hunter-gatherer
economy had long depended on the vast populations of hoofed and horned
grass-eaters that roamed the Great Steppe and the foothills of
neighboring mountain regions. Swift and agile enough to usually outrun
predators, they traveled in herds to avoid being picked off singly.
Such itinerant groups were superbly equipped to rove across dozens or
hundreds of miles throughout a year, cropping one range before moving
on to another. Since wild grasses can grow back quickly and feed
migrating herds more than once in the course of a year, the animals
and their food supply were usually able to exist in stable ecological
balance.

The West Asian ungulates (as zoologists call hoofed mammals) included
Old World bison, assorted gazelles and antelopes, and four other great
lineages that in time would beget the first domesticated milk-givers:
goats, sheep, cattle, and horses. Horses, the outlier in the quartet,
were domesticated long after the others and would not cross their
paths for several thousand years—though they would then become a
game-changing factor in human relationships with the other three.

Students of Neolithic civilizations believe that as with plants, the
domestication of wild goats, sheep, and cattle occurred in stages over
centuries or millennia rather than being the result of one bright
idea. As the anthropologist David W. Anthony has observed, “Animal
domestication, like marriage, is the culmination of a long prior
relationship”—undoubtedly one that had begun with hunting and
killing these creatures for their meat, along with gazelles and the
rest. Successful hunters knew how to track a herd’s movements and
corner it at some vulnerable point.

As people learned to coordinate group efforts and reliably steer herds
into massive ambushes, they began to deplete some wild populations.
Eventually somebody would have tried capturing and penning up a few
young members of a herd, to be raised to maturity before slaughter.
This approach had some success with individual captives, which often
allowed themselves to be tamed. But real domestication required
something far more difficult: getting the captives to reproduce so as
to keep renewing the supply. Even today, no one fully understands why
some creatures resist breeding in confinement much more stubbornly
than others—one of the chief factors that hinder zoos from
replenishing the numbers of many species now endangered in the wild.

For whatever reason, the first grazing animals of suitable size—that
is, small enough for one or two strong men to tangle with them—that
were finally persuaded to mate under permanent human custody were
local wild goats and sheep. In them, late Neolithic peoples of the
Fertile Crescent and its mountainous fringes had managed to find two
of the very few hoofed mammals that can be chaperoned down the path to
domestication.

Over many generations, probably starting at or before about 10,000 BC,
selected groups of goats and sheep not only accepted human control in
preference to freedom but began to deviate from their ancestral
morphology (structure and outward appearance). Zooarchaeologists are
not always sure whether bones recovered from the early transitional
period belonged to wild or domesticated goats and sheep, but the final
differences are so unmistakable that the animals are now classified in
their own species, Capra hircus and Ovis aries. The coat of curly,
crimped hairs—“wool”—that domesticated sheep acquired while
losing an ancestral outer coat of longer hairs is only one example of
morphological change.

A third target of Neolithic hunters was a much more terrifying
candidate for domestication: Bos primigenius, the huge wild ox or
aurochs (plural “aurochsen,” as in “oxen”). This ancestor of
all domesticated cattle breeds was among the largest and fiercest
creatures of the Old World grasslands. For sheer bulk, aurochsen would
have presented greater challenges than wild goats or sheep. Almost no
modern breeds suggest the size of full-grown aurochs bulls. The
towering Italian Chianina, which is often six feet high at the
shoulder and can weigh as much as 3,500 pounds, gives an idea of how
unanswerably an aurochs must have stacked up against any human. The
bulls were at least as aggressive as Spanish fighting bulls, though
these are deliberately bred for less fearsome size and rarely reach
five feet or 1,500 pounds.

Nevertheless, this powerful creature turned out to be one of the few
herbivores that people finally managed to mold into a domesticated
species, Bos bovis. The first domesticated cattle—selected for
undersized dimensions—were considerably smaller than aurochsen, an
obvious advantage for handlers. Nobody ever managed to completely
breed the original ferocity out of bulls. But cows became habituated
to conceiving and giving birth in captivity, if human helpers could
introduce them to a sire without being mowed down in the process. Few
domestic mammals show more striking male-female differences than
today’s cattle, in either physique or behavior.

It is impossible to pinpoint a place or date where some inquisitive
person first tried to milk one of the animals being kept for meat. The
idea must have occurred to people in more than one corner of the
general region, though adopting it as standard practice may have taken
many centuries. Two things are certain: the subjects of early
experiments did not have the large, capacious udders of today’s
dairy animals, and did not share their compliant attitude toward being
milked. Not only is shoving oneself between a nursing mother and her
young a good way to get attacked, but simply yanking on a teat will do
nothing but agitate her more.

Like human mothers, lactating goats, sheep, and cows have an
instinctive need to see, touch, and smell the nurslings who depend on
their milk. These sensory cues reinforce the particular combination of
suction and pressure that the infant’s mouth exerts in suckling,
helping to stimulate production of the hormone oxytocin, which governs
the “letdown reflex.” The first humans who managed to trick the
mother into letting down her milk had to allow the little one an
initial few moments of nursing and then keep it as close to her as
possible, usually by tethering it to her front leg or neck, while
cleverly mimicking the suckling rhythm with their fingers wrapped
around a teat in a particular grasp. (A later refinement in prompting
the hormonal trigger was to have a helper blow air through a pipe
inserted into the animal’s vagina or anus.) Another certainty is
that by comparison with modern norms, these efforts would have yielded
much smaller amounts of milk—though milk more naturally concentrated
than anything one can buy today.

We do not know in what forms prehistoric peoples consumed milk, except
that they could not have easily digested it fresh from the udder.
Nonetheless, milking skills seem to have become well advanced by late
Neolithic times (possibly about 6,500 BC) in the greater Fertile
Crescent.

As living with the results of both plant and animal domestication
became second nature to people, some intractable conflicts arose
between the demands of the two enterprises. The old hunter-gatherer
life allowed bands of humans to move around synchronously with both
the annual migrations of animals and the seasons of wild fruits,
vegetables, and anything else that can be reaped with two hands.
Tending crops meant a break with this mobility and either rapidly or
by slow degrees imposed a sedentary life on the tenders.

Sedentism, however, was an abnormal condition for herbivores used to
eating their way from range to range. For them, survival had always
been contingent on grazing one patch of grass, then moving on to the
next. Where grass was plentiful, they could linger a while; where it
was scarce, they had to cover wider areas. Goats were somewhat
flexible in their needs, since they could readily browse on shrub or
tree leaves. Sheep and to some extent cattle depended more heavily on
grass. And as people soon found, any restricted pasturage on which a
herd is kept grazing without letup is soon depleted, often with
serious damage to the ground itself.

The dilemma for two-legged keepers moving on foot was how to either
provide these instinctive wanderers with everything they needed
(including protection against animal predators and human thieves) in
an artificially confined space or travel as far and fast as they did.
Sedentism-versus-mobility choices were an early example of a quandary
that has never gone away: how to use land resources to balance a
community’s food demands against the environmental costs that come
with raising animals—or, to state the issue another way, mismatches
between food consumption and sustainable food production. Complex
modern economies have not so much solved these problems as displaced
them beyond the everyday view of the consuming public, especially
since the growth of cities began shunting the people who consumed
perishable products into living spaces far distant from the site of
production.

* Milk
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