Archaeology: The milk revolution

Nature ^ | 7-31-2013 | Andrew Curry

[Renfield]

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw.

Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,” says Bogucki, now at Princeton University in New Jersey. He had seen something similar at a friend's house that was used for straining cheese, so he speculated that the pottery might be connected with cheese-making. But he had no way to test his idea.

The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world...

[Ditter]

Alrighty then, I'll drink your part! :)

I have had a glass of milk every night before bed for my whole life. I am a 73 year old woman and when I get a bone scan every few years they always write WOW! on my chart.

Years ago when my husband was in the USCoastGuard I slipped down a flight of stairs and the doctor at a military hospital thought my wrist might be broken. He sent me to x-ray. When they looked at my x-ray (no break) they said I had the whitest bones they had ever seen on an x-ray and that was after looking mostly at the bones of healthy young men.

Milk is good! :)