This day in history, circa some 7,000 years ago, our early relatives couldn’t digest milk. At least so says new research by University College London scientists who claim that human ancestors lacked the gene required to produce the enzymes most of us have now to process cow’s milk. The working theory, according to the Khaleej Times Online and the BBC, is that Europeans and subsequently Americans developed milk tolerance as dairy farming emerged. The reports note that while northern Europeans and some African and Middle Eastern populations can drink milk, most of the rest of the world’s adult population cannot digest milk’s sugar lactose. Scientists set out to find out whether lactose tolerance led to dairy farming or that exposure to milk led to the evoluton of lactose tolerance.
“This is a simple chicken or egg question, but one that is very important to archaeologists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists,” one of the researchers, Dr. Mark Thomas, is quoted as saying. “We found that the lactose tolerance variant of the lactase gene only became common after dairy farming, which started around 9,000 years ago in Europe.”
Image: Women Milking Cows, from Harvest of History.
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