TRACES of milk found in 9000-year-old ceramic pot fragments have pushed back the earliest known consumption of animal milk by people by a millennium.
Cattle, sheep and goats were domesticated in the Near East about 10,000 years ago, but many archaeologists believe people used only their meat and hides at first, with secondary uses such as wool, power and milk coming much later.
Richard Evershed at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues collected 2225 pottery fragments from the Near East, dating from the seventh to fifth millennia BC. By measuring carbon isotope ratios in organic residues on the shards, they found that many 鈥� especially very old ones from north-west Anatolia, now Turkey 鈥� had contained milk (Nature, ).
Advertisement
Other studies indicate that the people of the era lacked the enzymes to digest animal milk in its fresh form, but if it had been stored in the form of cheese or butter they would have been able to consume it, the authors say.
In order to milk animals, people must have kept them nearby and closely controlled. This implies that early pastoralists had tighter social organisation than previously thought, says Margie Burton of the San Diego Archaeological Center in California.
Human Evolution 鈥� Follow the incredible story in our comprehensive special report.
