A new study found that drinking milk made ancient people taller and heavier. It also found that drinking milk had a direct effect on the patterns of lactose intolerance in Europe today.
The data for the study, which was released on Tuesday, came from a researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. The study compared skeletons from archaeological sites that date back 25,000 years.
The research, which was led by the University of Western Ontario, found that people were bigger between 2,000 and 7,000 years ago in places where they had more genes that make enzymes that digest milk into adulthood. This is called lactase persistence.
Because of this, lactose intolerance is more common in the north of Europe than in the south.
In the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of 16 scientists compared the height and body mass of 3,507 skeletons from 366 different archaeological sites. This made a large set of data that could be used to compare how people’s bodies change over time and space.
Exploration of the past
Most of the samples in the data set used for the study were from Europe. Researchers said that this was mostly because archaeologists were exploring the continent more often.
Dr. Eóin Parkinson from the school of natural and built environment at Queen’s University Belfast gave data for the study. He said the research showed that in some parts of the world, drinking milk led to more bone growth.
“Everyone remembers being told as a child to drink their milk because it would help them grow. We can almost think of this in terms of how humans evolved, and we can see that trends in dairy consumption from as far back as 7,000 years ago have an effect on how people process dairy products today.
“Drinking milk and eating dairy products are important parts of food culture in many parts of the world, so it’s interesting to learn about the biological processes that make these things happen.”
Dr. Parkinson said that in some parts of northern and central Europe, where the climate wasn’t right for the Asian crops that were brought there, “human societies responded by drinking more milk.”
The study was led by Prof. Jay Stock from the University of Western Ontario. He said that drinking milk has been “culturally important” on different continents, and that drinking milk has left genetic traces. “People in western Africa, the Rift Valley, and the Horn of Africa, as well as some parts of Arabia and Mongolia, have a lot of lactase persistence genes,” he said.
