This is an interesting story – British researchers now believe that humans first evolved into milk drinkers 7,500 years ago in the Balkans and that they used the ability to drink milk in order to populate northern Europe, including Britain. The researchers are calling milk, the first superfood, since it helped the early humans to gain an advantage over non-milk drinkers. Cool!
Milk would have provided them with a steady and reliable source of nutrition – including essential vitamin D, which in warmer climes would have been provided by sunlight hitting the skin.
The success of the milk drinkers meant they went on to inhabit most of Europe and explains why everyone who lives on the Continent is tolerant to the milk sugar lactose – unlike 65 per cent of the globe.
It could also be why Europe became the first superpower.
Professor Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist, at University College London, who led the study, said milk was “the world’s first superfood”.
His team used computer models to map the genetic change that enabled early Europeans to evolve their tolerance to lactose after the introduction of cattle farming.
Before this, Stone Age people were “lactose intolerant” – just like many modern humans today, according to the study published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.
Prof Thomas said: “Conditions were really tough for early settlers. Crops regularly failed and they would have been on the edge of starvation.
“But they had cattle which meant they could produce milk. It would have made some of them sick and given them diarrhoea, and when you are starving this can be fatal. But by building up their tolerance to milk these people were gaining an enormous advantage.
“It was the world’s first superfood and without it the history of northern Europe would have been put back a thousand years.
“The Mediterranean countries would have become far more culturally significant and even our languages today would have been entirely different. Milk has given us a great deal to be thankful for.”
3 Comments on “Milk was the First Superfood”
Nice to read something positive about the lovely stuff, though many nutritionists seem to claim that milk can not be so readily digested after 7 years of age (the drinker that is not the milk!). So why have we now reverted to being lactose intolerant once again?
Nice to read something positive about the lovely stuff, though many nutritionists seem to claim that milk can not be so readily digested after 7 years of age (the drinker that is not the milk!). So why have we now reverted to being lactose intolerant once again?
Nice to read something positive about the lovely stuff, though many nutritionists seem to claim that milk can not be so readily digested after 7 years of age (the drinker that is not the milk!). So why have we now reverted to being lactose intolerant once again?