Russian researchers and colleagues from other countries learned exactly when the steppe peoples of the Caucasus and Eurasia began to consume dairy products. Article about it published It was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The transition to cattle breeding is considered one of the most important milestones in the development of humanity. Animals have become a reliable source of food for humans to make tools. At the same time, it is not easy to determine the exact time of the development of cattle breeding due to the paucity of written sources and the scarcity of material artifacts from this period.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and their Russian colleagues studied a set of proteins preserved in the tartar of 45 people who lived 9-3.5 thousand years ago in the Caucasus and Pontic-Caspian steppes. Eating leaves marks on the teeth, which is unique to each dairy product.
It turns out that dairy farming already existed 7 thousand years ago in the steppe region of the North Caucasus. At the same time, judging by the marks on the teeth, people drank only sheep’s milk. According to other archaeological traces, cattle at that time were slaughtered only for meat, sacrificed and used as pack animals.
About 4-5 thousand years ago, the diet of pastoralists was enriched with goat and cow milk. Then came the period of drought and cold winter, and people returned to raising sheep that used less water and could withstand the cold better.
Source: Gazeta
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