Originally Posted By: BHopkins
I noticed you left out the "if man were meant to drink milk we would produce it ourselves" line. That really is pretty lame. And with all respect, there is the one you used, where you say humans are the only ones to drink milk from another mammal. It really is a pretty lame line, considering there are thousands upon thousands of things that only the human race does.
BTW, go back to what I said...we are the only animals that drink milk after we are weaned...No distinction on the grow it ourselves, or of other mammals, not sure where you get the statement that you attribute to me.
OK, I'll try to avoid being lame...if we were meant to drink milk all our lives, we would have produced the enzymes to do so, wouldn't we ? ... after we were weaned...for all of human evolutionary history eh ?
https://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1.13471
Quote:
During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/201...ctose-tolerance
Quote:
Got milk? Ancient European farmers who made cheese thousands of years ago certainly had it. But at that time, they lacked a genetic mutation that would have allowed them to digest raw milk's dominant sugar, lactose, after childhood.
Today, however, 35 percent of the global population — mostly people with European ancestry — can digest lactose in adulthood without a hitch.
So, how did we transition from milk-a-phobics to milkaholics? "The first and most correct answer is, we don't know," says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London in the U.K.
Most babies can digest milk without getting an upset stomach thanks to an enzyme called lactase. Up until several thousand years ago, that enzyme turned off once a person grew into adulthood — meaning most adults were lactose intolerant (or "lactase nonpersistent," as scientists call it).
we seemed to get along for the first few hundred thousands of years without drinking milk as adults.
Note the difference between "drinking milk", and the process of storing dairy proteins and fats as cheese and butter.
