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Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn't drink milk:
About 3000 years ago, thousands of warriors fought on the banks of the Tollense river in northern Germany. They wielded weapons of wood, stone, and bronze to deadly effect: Over the past decade, archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of hundreds of people buried in marshy soil. It's one of the largest prehistoric conflicts ever discovered.
Now, genetic testing of the skeletons reveals the homelands of the warriors—and unearths a shocker about early European diets: These soldiers couldn't digest fresh milk.
Searching for more insight into the battle, researchers sequenced the DNA of 14 of the skeletons. They discovered the warriors all hailed from central Europe—what is today Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, their genetic similarity offers little insight into why they fought.
"We were hoping to find two different groups of people with different ethnic backgrounds, but no," says study co-author Joachim Burger, a geneticist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. "It's disappointingly boring."
However, two of the 14 skeletons were women, suggesting a more complex scene than archaeologists had reconstructed.
The study, published today in the journal Cell Biology, turned up a different surprise, too. None of the warriors had the genetic mutation that allows adults to digest milk, an ability known as lactase persistence that's common in many Europeans.
Journal Reference:
Joachim Burger. Low Prevalence of Lactase Persistence in Bronze Age Europe Indicates Ongoing Strong Selection over the Last 3,000 Years, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.033)
(Score: 4, Funny) by looorg on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:54PM (11 children)
"... their genetic similarity offers little insight into why they fought."
Might I suggest it was the great lactose crusade? Death to the milkdrinkers!
That said I am somewhat surprised that you they can be disappointed in that they find only central European skeletons in central Europe from a battle that took place 3000 years ago. What exactly did they expect? People from Africa?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:07PM (9 children)
You joke, but "Death to the milk drinkers" is probably a fair war cry in several of the range wars that happened in the United States' old west. The discrepancy between the needs of pig herders(whose herds need relatively little land at a time but gorge and render the range useless for grazing for a year or so) and the needs of cowherds(who need a lot of grazing space, but can cycle through fields as they recover over the course of weeks) has led to multiple family feuds that ended up with armed conflict.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:14PM (4 children)
I thought the big wars in the West were between ranchers of cattle and sheep. Sheep clip the grass far closer to the root.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:26PM
Maybe I have a mixup in my head. Regurgitating shit you saw in a documentary you watched one time isn't always exactly on model.
(Score: 2) by knarf on Thursday September 10 2020, @05:44PM (2 children)
Ah, but you're talking about the Big wars while the parent talks about the Pig wars, now there's a difference...
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Thursday September 10 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)
There was a Pig War, but not in the plains -- it was on an island in the Puget Sound and the participants were the US and the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday September 10 2020, @09:01PM
I thought the Pig War was between Trump and Hillary?!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:28PM (3 children)
Or in a lactose-oriented culture, the lactose intolerant were driven away, or killed out of self-defense, given what they smell like when fed fresh milk. In cross-cultural exchanges the effects of lactose on the lactose intolerant could have been interpreted as mass poisoning and an initiation of aggression from the agrieved party. In cases where the technologies are rather evenly matched such as the Vikings and the First Nations, it then becomes a war of attrition and the smaller group get driven out or exterminated.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:53PM (2 children)
I'm somewhat unsure but I have my doubt that the Vikings and the Skraelings where on equal technological levels. One could form metals into armor and large blades, sail across the world in wooden ships and the other ... didn't. It was a war of attrition and logistics no doubt. So many of them there and so long to get reinforcements from the homeland, or even from Greenland which didn't even really have a very large population either. With that in mind one is almost surprised that they managed to hold on for as long as they did. It probably didn't help that they engaged in the usual rape-n-plunder scenarios, that had worked in other places. They know that they did that since they have found people on Iceland with DNA that wasn't Norse but more native American. So it might not be totally surprising that the colonization didn't work out all that well in the end.
But that said yes I guess there could be an interpretation that lactose intolerance could be interpreted as being poisoned. Which is as good as a justification as anything for a small war or massacre.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:48PM (1 child)
Sure, they outmatched the skraelings but not so much the people they encountered in what is now Newfoundland. Even with steel their advantage was not enough to deal with large numbers repeatedly. A colony there would have run on the supplies and people it brought with it. Even with flint arrowheads it would be feasible to grind down the colony over a few months.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 11 2020, @01:22AM
It wasn't that big a settlement. One longhouse, a boat shed, and a forge. They dug bog iron out of the creek that runs through the site, but that's not really enough to do much other than make some nails. One of the most favored hypotheses is that it was a way station to repair damage taken on the trip over from Greenland. The saga mentions Vinland being the main destination; nobody has found that location yet, but they know from butternut shells and grape pits that the Viking definitely were going somewhere further south because those plants have never grown in Newfoundland. New Brunswick, I believe, is the closest place they might have gone.
So it wouldn't have been much of a feat to wear L'Anse aux Meadows down. Keep attacking in waves until the Vikings drop from exhaustion. But my private theory is that the Vikings had their ultimate revenge by bequeathing upon the MicMacs and their fellow Amerindians European diseases that wiped out robust, established populations in North America and brought low even the great Mississippians.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:31PM
"What exactly did they expect? People from Africa?"
Of course not. Racism was more tolerated then than it is now. You'd think those Europeans could have been more accepting of the native race. Bronze Age Europe could have done better.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:59PM (8 children)
Even among modern people of European descent, adult lactase production is far from universal. It's more common in the indian subcontinent than in Europe. Even regulatory shift mutations found primarily in the exome like this that pose little risk of debilitating side effects and are uniformly positive take a while to spread through a population, unless not having the mutation gets individuals killed with astonishing predictability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:45PM (6 children)
"Far from universal."
I think you will find it is *close to* universal.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @05:13PM (5 children)
Totally and completely untrue [nih.gov]. More people in saudi arabia have adult lactate persistence than hungary or italy or greece.
This study does seem to contradict what I'd read about india before, so I'm glad I had to double check my beliefs. Thank you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @08:22PM (4 children)
From your own link, Introduction section:
"Lactase persistence is common in people of European ancestry as well as some African, Middle Eastern and Southern Asian groups, but is rare or absent elsewhere in the world."
Your own source contradicts you. Of course, you are playing a game where you point out a couple places in what we call Europe where it is not as common, but those places remain exceptions to the general trend. Greece is at the extreme end of what we call Europe, and in ancient historical times wasn't even considered Europe. It's next to the Middle East, so not a particularly representative set of genetics for Europe. You said in Italy there were numbers of people who couldn't digest milk, and since historically Italy was populated by Greeks on the coast, their genetic contribution is not surprising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @08:27PM
Hungary is at the edge of Europe as well.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @08:58PM (2 children)
I said "far from universal" and you said "nearly universal" and if you look...
Nevermind. Fuck it.
You read that paper, saw that it contradicted the idea of "nearly universal", and still decided to pretend you were right by refuting a point I never made. It's better to be wrong today than wrong for the rest of your life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @09:21PM (1 child)
Re-read your own original post, ikantread.
You opened the sentence with talking about people of European descent.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @11:06PM
Yes. And I'm totally 100% right.
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Thursday September 10 2020, @08:06PM
I though it was common knowledge, or maybe it's a myth - adult humans couldn't drink milk until a fairly recent genetic mutation enabled it, which isn't universally spread by any means.
I'm eastern european myself, and could drink milk just fine till about 20. Then the farts started, then it would just make me throw up by 25. Now for some reason I can drink the microfiltered fairlife milk which has the lactose filtered out, but I can't drink regular milk - even lactaid. which is fucking strange.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:11PM (3 children)
By comparing genetics you're likely to find genetic differences, not ethnic ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:16PM
We all have the genetic capability to eat bugs.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:33PM (1 child)
Ethnicity is a very soft concept. It doesn't really mean anything without context. "These people are from neighboring regions with different ancestors" could be called an ethnic difference? Prehistoric peoples often had more extensive travel and trade than we may intuit from the term "prehistoric"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @02:19PM
Prehistoric would be "preliterate" if we were going for accuracy.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:51PM (8 children)
This kind of science is flawed and completely misleading.
Let's check the article:
Dear scientists, do you think we programmers are stupid or what?
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:03PM (3 children)
Maybe not enough coffee yet, but I don't quite understand the point you're making, even if it is being made in jest.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:42PM (2 children)
I think Mojibake's point is, we are extrapolating far too much, from far too little information. For starters, hundreds of bodies might suggest, but don't prove, that there were thousands of combatants. In a well executed ambush, fifty warriors might kill off hundreds of enemy. Thermopolae is but one example of a smaller force inflicting insane casualties on a larger force.
Secondly, doing DNA tests on 1/10 (or less) of the available bodies doesn't prove that they were all descended from common stock. Maybe the other side carried their own dead and wounded off for treatment and/or burial at some remote location.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Touché) by EJ on Thursday September 10 2020, @05:13PM (1 child)
What kind of nonsense are you peddling? Didn't you know that Commander Data's ENTIRE MIND AND MEMORIES could be reconstructed via fractal mathematics from a SINGLE positronic neuron?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @03:25PM
That's the power of math!
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2020, @05:39PM (1 child)
You claim to have read the article and yet
They clearly describe having found triple digits of dead, and extrapolate thousands by virtue of the proportion of the site that's been excavated. Full genome sequencing is expensive, and I see why they'd only do it for a small, somewhat representative sample of the combatants.
At first glance, I'd say I do indeed think you're stupid.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 11 2020, @01:25AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @07:52PM
Internet experts are so stupid.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 11 2020, @02:39AM
Let's keep in mind what you think [soylentnews.org] is science:
Notice the insistence on the scientifically correctness of the data (IQ test results from a bunch of countries of the world), without even boilerplate about the numerous flaws of IQ tests (such as culture differences, what are they actually measuring, etc).
Then there's the time you claimed Ukrainian soldiers were involuntary test subjects for US covid vaccines with numerous deaths claimed. And your sole evidence was some fringe media from central Europe. So maybe, it's just not worth our while to learn what you think on the matter.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 10 2020, @08:02PM
People infected with cowpox [wikipedia.org] developed immunity to smallpox [wikipedia.org].
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @08:00PM
So you're saying that Bronze Age Europeans were Chinese? That would explain why noodles exist in both Italy and China.