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posted by martyb on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the Grommit!-The-moon-is-made-of-Ch-e-e-e-e-s-e! dept.

Scientists are trying to explain why people began consuming animals' milk before they developed genetic mutations which enabled them to digest it properly.

The mutations mean people produce lactase—an enzyme which breaks down milk sugars, called lactose—after they reach adulthood. Without the mutations, lactase production stops in childhood, which can lead to lactose intolerance.

"There is at least a 4,000 year gap between when we see the earliest evidence of dairying and when we see first the evidence of any mutations anywhere in the world," said Professor Christina Warinner, head of microbiome sciences at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

Only about 35% of the world's population today have lactase persistence mutations. They exist mainly in European populations—especially northwestern Europe—and their descendants, and in parts of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

"If we can work out the evolutionary history and mechanics of lactose intolerance (how diet, human genetics, and gut microbes interact), we will have a powerful model for how to tackle other complex digestive disorders and food allergies," said Prof. Warinner.

[...] "The reason people were able to eat dairy before we had the ability to process lactose is because of fermentation," said Cheryl Makarewicz, professor at the University of Kiel, Germany.

"It shows the power of this kind of processing and how it can impact how your body reacts to different foodstuffs," she said. Fermented foods contain microbes which may also play a part in people's digestion.

Microbes in people's guts may have also evolved to break down the lactose. "This hasn't been well studied … It's something we're trying to test," said Prof. Warinner.

To do this, Dairy Cultures scientists are exploring the microbiome, the genetic makeup of microbes that live in the gut, which include bacteria, viruses and fungi. They are studying samples from herders to see if they contain elevated levels of microbes that aid milk digestion.

"The more we can understand about how the microbiome functioned in the past and what it is capable of, the better we will understand how and why the microbiome is changing now and why it is associated with so many health problems today," she said.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @01:24AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @01:24AM (#948691)
    It might be "obvious" when you think about it, but unless you have the archaeological and biological evidence to support it, all you have is a (well-reasoned, admittedly) hypothesis which means jack squat until evidence is found for it. It was even more obvious to Aristotle and his contemporaries that heavier things fell faster than lighter things. Galileo though, tried to get evidence of this "obvious" phenomenon by supposedly dropping cannonballs of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but instead found, much to everyone's surprise, all other things being equal, light and heavy objects fell at the same rate. You might be right, but biology and archaeology have also pulled a lot of similar surprises.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:44AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:44AM (#948734)

    Yes, that's what makes this hard.

    I'd suggest that it's likely that early people realized that women lactate to feed their babies, so when they saw other animals lactating, they tried drinking it. But, I'm not even sure how you would go about proving/disproving that hypothesis as we already know that humans can drink milk and the benefits/consequences of doing so.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:58AM (#948740)
      Fossilised shit. Seriously. There's even a technical term for them: coprolites. Analyses of fossil shit can tell a lot about the diet of ancient peoples. Ancient rubbish middens and latrines have a lot of stories to tell.