As far I understand it, as civilization appeared in various parts of the world, the usual pattern was that a people went first through a pastoral stage, where they lived more or less nomadically and lived by herding animals such as cattle or sheep. But, most of humanity seems to be lactose intolerant today. Would that have been the case during the early pastoral stage of prehistory? The reason I ask is that if you are lactose intolerant, then the only things you can use from a herd of cattle is the meat and leather (but those things come out of “capital” as it were), or butter, which contains only fat, and you can’t live on just that. The other things you can get from an herbivore as an ongoing concern, such as milk solids, cheese, and milk itself would be right out.
So how did early herders get enough value out of a herd of cattle? For that matter, how about traditional herdspeople in Africa today, who herd cattle, yet Africans are famously lactose intolerant.
Africans, as a whole, are famously lactose intolerant. The cattle-herding tribes of east Africa are fairly lactose tolerant. Here’s a map (it’s a .pdf, and you have to scroll down a bit): Old World lactose intolerance map.
You get more than that. You use cattle (and oxen) as draft animals. In many places, like India, yiou can use the droppings for fuel and even construction material. Not only butter (which is ubiquitous in a lot of cooking), but also cheese comes from cattle, which, depending upon the type and preparation, the lactose intolerant can eat. More to the point, in a pre-refrogeration society, cheese is one food that can be aged and stored for long periods without going bad. This is no trivial thing. (See Marvin Harris’ books “Cows, Pigs, War, and Witches” and “Good to Eat” on the many uses of cattle in society, and why it makes economic sense for the Hindus not to eat beef.)
On top of which, the lactose intolerant can consume dairy products – it doesn’t kill them (Pepper Mill is Lactose Intolerant). If you’re living in a subsistence economy, every little bit helps.
Africans may be lactose intolerant, but African tribes who herd cattle are famously lactose tolerant.
The difference is a mutation on a single gene so that the signal that turns off lactase formation in the intestines is never sent. This is a random mutation that spontaneously appears, and it’s also a dominant mutation, which means that selection pressures will spread it rapidly through a population.
That appears to have happened to a number of African tribes. A new genetic study caused an enormous stir in the scientific world just last month on this very topic.
Take a look at a typical article out of the many that appeared, this one from the Scientific American website.
The OP is also wrong about what early peoples can get out of milk. Naturally low-lactose cultured or fermented foods like cheese, yogurt, and kefir seem to have appeared thousands of years ago in the Middle East, where herding is thought to have originated. These products not only were tolerated because of the lessened lactose content but kept well in the heat, better than liquid milk. Butter was also well known, although more of a luxury product since it wouldn’t keep well. Ancient recipes using dairy products are found from many societies than we would consider to be lactose intolerant today. Besides, what’s wrong with “just” meat and leather? That’s what societies get from pigs and pigs are ubiquitous.
Humans are remarkably ingenious in finding ways to utilize any available food, even if in forms that need processing or other work to be palatable. Milk is just one of these.
A blog search brought up this post, Milk-Drinking Crucial to Human Evolution, which contains more background on the evolution of milk in African tribes. It also links to the New York Times article that broke the news on the new study.
This is a very interesting point. If you go to the Hall of Man in Africa at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, there’s actually a diorama showing some West African cattleherders “bleeding” a cow for its blood. The bleeding depicted takes only a small amount, and doesn’t hurt the animal. I don’t recall if it was used for ceremonial purposes or for food, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were the latter.
Of course, those people aren’t lactose intolerant – they drink milk.
You’ve got the wrong tense there. I once had the privilege of visiting a Masai family in northern Tanzania. Part was through, we were offered refreshments from a long necked gourd. There was a bit of a discussion to determine if the contents contained cattle blood, or if it was without. Thankfully (for my peace of mind) it was fresh milk and corn/maize.
Africans aren’t the only ones who’ve bled cattle. From Wikipedia’s “Irish Cuisine”:
From the middle ages, till the arrival of the potato in the latter half of the 17th Century, the dominant feature of the rural economy was the herding of cattle. The meat produced was mostly the preserve of the gentry and nobility. The poor generally made do with milk, butter, cheese and offal, supplemented with oats and barley. The practice of bleeding cattle and mixing the blood with milk and butter (not unlike the practice of the Masai) was not uncommon. Black pudding remains a breakfast staple in Ireland.
Yes, this is Wikipedia. But I’ve read elsewhere that the Irish were bleeding cattle as late as the 16th century–& not just for pudding.