"...Go ahead. Ask us about our milk. Do you feel lucky? Well...do ya...punk?"
Posted on 04/01/2010 8:50:18 AM PDT by decimon
The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. This has been shown by a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, supports the researchers' earlier conclusion that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later.
"This group of hunter-gatherers differed significantly from modern Swedes in terms of the DNA sequence that we generally associate with a capacity to digest lactose into adulthood," says Anna Linderholm, formerly of the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University, presently at University College Cork, Ireland.
According to the researchers, two possible explanations exist for the DNA differences.
"One possibility is that these differences are evidence of a powerful selection process, through which the Stone Age hunter-gatherers' genes were lost due to some significant advantage associated with the capacity to digest milk," says Anna Linderholm. "The other possibility is that we simply are not descended from this group of Stone Age people."
The capacity to consume unprocessed milk into adulthood is regarded as having been of great significance for human prehistory.
"This capacity is closely associated with the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies," says Anders Götherström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University.
He serves as coordinator of LeCHE (Lactase persistence and the early Cultural History of Europe), an EU-funded research project focusing on the significance of milk for European prehistory.
"In the present case, we are inclined to believe that the findings are indicative of what we call "gene flow," in other words, migration to the region at some later time of some new group of people, with whom we are genetically similar," he says. "This accords with the results of previous studies."
The researchers' current work involves investigating the genetic makeup of the earliest agriculturalists in Scandinavia, with an eye to potential answers to questions about our ancestors.
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For additional information, please contact: Anders Götherström: +46-18-471 64 83; e-mail: anders.gotherstrom@ebc.uu.se or Anna Linderholm: +353-87 24 33 570; e-mail: annalinderholm@hotmail.com
"...Go ahead. Ask us about our milk. Do you feel lucky? Well...do ya...punk?"
Keeping cows at a large scale was common, not only in Denmark and southern Sweden (which is the warmest and most fertile part of Scandinavia), but even in Iceland were some farms had up to 60 cows.
So, if the people that inhabited Scandinavia during the Stone Age were lactose intolerant, something drastic evidently must have happened between that time and the Viking Age.
Excavations? My second cousin is married to an ethnic Swede whose family has run a dairy farm for 1000 years. (Supposedly some ancestor went a viking {plundering} and bought land, cattle, and a wife with the proceeds.)
Heh, an anti-dowry. Buy a wife. Ancient Israel had that as well. It was assumed a female slave was a wife. Meanwhile I think wives from “good” families came with dowries of some sort.
- Fascinating.
Even though most farms in Scandinavia are way younger, there are certain ones that old.
Before there were Lutheran warrior kings like Gustavus Adolphus, inventors like Nobel and Nordic IT success stories like Nokia, Skype and Ericsson, there were free men running their own farms all over Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland.
Perhaps this is off topic, but I claim there is a strong connection between the overall success of Scandinavian business life of today and Scandinavian agricultural history, which differs a lot from that of France, Italy, Japan, Germany and other industrialized countries where the common man more or less used to be a slave prior to the days of industrialization.
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Thanks decimon. |
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There was a thread related to Scandinavia and those that originally settled the place as opposed to those that came later. Someone posted, referring to earlies having an aversion to those slimey things with fins, fish, never heard of that. You?
Got Milk? Oops sorry. (runs and hides!)
I just skimmed this article, maybe I should read it in entire.
That’s the ticket.
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