CAVEMANforum - The most popular Paleo diet and caveman exercise discussion site
September 08, 2010, 04:33:08 AM *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
News: Buy your supplements at iHerb.com.  Get $5 free by using code ZEB079 and support the site at the same time!
 
   Home   Help Search Login Register  
Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Milk  (Read 1279 times) Bookmark and Share
littlewolfuk
Corporal
*

Karma: +2/-1
Offline Offline

Posts: 36


View Profile
« on: October 20, 2008, 06:29:28 PM »

I have been researching archaeological articles about stone age man and it becomes clear that tethering posts come up a lot, and then I remembered a docu of a primative people who catch wild milk barring animals with the calf/baby etc and take some of the milk (very carefully as the animal is wild) and then let the animal go after weaning is over.

so there must have been a little dairy in the diet. It stand to reason really as we are omnivorous and like the bear will try and eat and use anything ! LOL

So....possible dairy but in small amounts, maybe it was a seasonal thing in the spring or summer months. The dairy would be a good preservative also re fats and medicines.
Logged
slafrance
Corporal
*

Karma: +6/-0
Offline Offline

Posts: 34


slafrance3
View Profile Email
« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2008, 03:35:19 AM »

Here is an interesting question I'd like to pose for you.

Name one animal that habitually drinks the milk of another animal after it is weaned from its mother?
Logged
Warren Dew
General
****

Karma: +246/-22
Offline Offline

Posts: 2331



View Profile WWW
« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2008, 08:52:00 AM »

I suspect that what you saw in the documentary was a tribe that was on the cusp of becoming herders.  For example, there used to be people who basically treated reindeer herds as their own, even though they followed the herds instead of having actually domesticated them.  Again, while that happened in the stone age, it's a neolithic habit, not a paleolithic one.

Most of the world's population cannot digest lactose in adulthood, and regular use of milk will cause painful gas or diarrhea from intestinal flora that grows on the lactose.  I'm in that category myself.

Most caucasians are an exception to this; there have been several independently occurring mutations that have led to human populations that can digest lactose.  These mutations appear to have originated in northern Europe and east Africa, if I remember correctly.  There are links to some articles in some of the other threads.

If you have the gene for adult lactose tolerance, milk won't cause the acute symptoms, but cow's milk still has plenty of other things that weren't a large part of the human diet during the paleolithic.

That said, I'm sure plenty of paleolithic humans ate small amounts of unusual foods.  While butter isn't paleo, for example, I still use small amounts of it now and then.
Logged
littlewolfuk
Corporal
*

Karma: +2/-1
Offline Offline

Posts: 36


View Profile
« Reply #3 on: October 21, 2008, 04:25:17 PM »

Yes I can see that , but the excavations in Azerbajan and other stine age archaeology do report tethering posts. I would think that the lactose problem may not necessarily be due to what we think but could be more to do with genetics, plague killing off people etc and movements of peoples, as many people do not have the intolerance.

Also as to the general milk thing..we eat EVERYTHING we can put are hands on animal, vegetable etc and getting some free milk from a pregnant animal would be logical.

Some tribes may have done this others not depending on where they are and the avaiablity of animals and types of animal.

Hunter gathers eat tnnes of differnt things, some creep, crawl and we wouldnt eat them nowadays LOL !...

ancient people must have been intelligent just different, no metals etc but they were clever in fint and wood and hand weaving etc, I study wildcrafting and bushcrafting and you realsie through doing it that theres so much the ancient people could do !


Logged
Warren Dew
General
****

Karma: +246/-22
Offline Offline

Posts: 2331



View Profile WWW
« Reply #4 on: October 21, 2008, 07:43:00 PM »

the excavations in Azerbajan and other stine age archaeology do report tethering posts

That would make them new stone age - neolithic - sites, rather than old stone age - cave man or paleolithic - sites.

I'd agree that hunter gatherers would eat everything they could get their hands on, but faced with a pregnant animal, I think it would be hard to resist killing it and eating the whole thing rather than just stealing some milk!
Logged
Warren Dew
General
****

Karma: +246/-22
Offline Offline

Posts: 2331



View Profile WWW
« Reply #5 on: October 31, 2008, 10:44:28 PM »

This probably enabled humans to drink more milk from their mothers for longer time - I really have no idea why the mutation came along and spread - could have been completely random, or maybe some humans did indeed begin to drink milk from other animals.

There's actually pretty strong evidence that adult lactose tolerance spread because of bovine milk in the diet.  For example, cattle were domesticated in northeast Africa about 9000 years ago, and the mutation that originated there for adult lactose tolerance started becoming common about 7000 years ago:

http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=1376

This was after the paleolithic, in the early neolithic period, and it's likely that the alternative to drinking milk for these populations was starving.  In the same time period, agriculture was spreading, human populations were booming, and people were becoming smaller and less healthy, etc.

The north European mutation for adult lactose tolerance is a different mutation with the same effect, and originates in another area where cattle are thought to have been domesticated early.

The fact that multiple mutations happened so recently with this effect has an interesting reason.  They are all in the same region of chromosome 2.  This region of chromosome 2 is a small distance upstream of the genes coding for lactose digestion, and is likely responsible for turning lactose tolerance off after infancy, so any mutation that damages this region allows the gene for lactose tolerance to stay on into adulthood.

As you say, that doesn't mean we're suited for utilizing all the other ingredients in cow's milk effectively.  That would likely require the development of entirely new genes, not just a point mutation to turn one gene off, and entirely new genes made up of many base pairs would take a lot longer than 10,000 years to develop.
Logged
littlewolfuk
Corporal
*

Karma: +2/-1
Offline Offline

Posts: 36


View Profile
« Reply #6 on: November 01, 2008, 09:18:18 AM »

I wasnt really thinking bovine milk ..at least not much of it. As i said in the previous posting, that catching a pregnent animal, bovine, elk, goat whatever and using the milk over a short period of time in the year would have been a logical thing to do.. re tethering posts. As to the HUGE quantities of milk we drink in the west thats really not healthy adn as you say theres a lot of intolerance.

Much of the word though just drink a little goat milk, and not much of that....its just certain agri cultures who have concentrated on the cow and thats very very recent.


Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.11 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines LLC Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!
Page created in 0.142 seconds with 23 queries. (Pretty URLs adds 0.021s, 3q)