The Milkman Cometh

Whole milk is back on the menu in US schools

The Agricultural Revolution—the transition from hunter-gathering lifestyles to sedentary farming, beginning about 10,000 years ago in the Near East—is one of the great pivotal events in human history.

Without farming as a distinct mode of production, it’s hard to imagine the modern world ever happening. We’d probably still be living like the few remaining hunter-gatherers, like the Kalahari bushmen of Namibia, for example: small mobile bands, constantly in search of food and other basic resources, with very little in the way of technology or culture to show for 200,000 years of life on this planet.

With the dawn of agriculture, history began to accelerate at a speed that’s scarcely conceivable. Humanity went from stone-tipped spears and animal-skin clothing to nuclear weapons, space travel and AI programs that dream of raping Will Stancil, in less than 1/20th of the time Homo sapiens has existed.

The benefits and deficits of the Agricultural Revolution, and its parallels with contemporary efforts to force us all to adopt “plant-based diets,” are the subject of my 2022 book, The Eggs Benedict Option.

But there’s another event in human dietary history that, to my mind, deserves just as much credit for the making of the modern world as the domestication of grains like wheat and barley. That event was the discovery of dairying on the Eurasian steppe, in the Bronze Age, and the impetus it gave to the expansion of a group of peoples who are the ancestors of all Europeans—the people who created that world of nuclear weapons, space travel and robots that… ahem.

These progenitors are often called the Yamnaya or the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Along with the Neolithic farmers—who entered Europe from present-day Turkey—and the Western Hunter-gatherers, who returned to Europe after the great ice sheets disappeared, these milk-guzzling maniacs contributed the unique genetic pattern that’s shared across the length and breadth of the continent today, from Scandinavia to Serbia.

A Nature paper from 2021 revealed this process of expansion off the steppe in extraordinarily fine-grained detail, and the role that milk played in driving it.

Researchers took dental calculus—hardened plaque—from the teeth of Bronze Age skeletons from the western steppe and subjected it to proteomic analysis, which allowed the identification of the protein sources these people had been eating.

The evidence suggests a “secondary products revolution” in the early Bronze Age, around 3,500 BC, as the proto-Indo-Europeans learned how to domesticate livestock including cattle, sheep and horses and exploit them for their milk as well as their meat. Crucially, they also learned how to ride horses and make wheeled vehicles.

Now the Proto-Indo-Europeans had a readily available totally mobile food source of the highest quality: protein, fat, sugars, vitamins and minerals. What milk they didn’t use straight away, they could turn to yoghurt, kumiss (fermented milk) and cheese to take with them and eat later. They could also move. Fast.

Time to roll.

Between about 3,300 BC and 2,500 BC, archaeological and genetic evidence shows these Proto-Indo-Europeans embarking on a great migration that would take them from Scandinavia in the west, to the Altai Mountains of Siberia, in the east—a range of over 4,000 miles.

With their sick new whips, big muscles and milk moustaches, the proto-Indo-Europeans must have been a truly terrifying thing to behold. Which is to say, the migration was clearly not a peaceful one. The male Neolithic farmers have left behind no traces of paternal DNA in present-day Europeans, which can mean only one thing: They stopped reproducing. Whether they were killed or enslaved by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, or both, it can’t have been pretty. Only the females reproduced: wives or concubines of the new milkmen from the steppe.

I don’t know about you, but to my perpetually adolescent mind, the idea of a 4,000-mile high-speed killing spree fuelled by milk sounds pretty cool. Did I need another excuse to go and grab a cold glass from the fridge? I didn’t (and I will, thank you very much).

We knew the white stuff was a superfood, capable of fuelling superhuman efforts, long before we knew anything about the Proto-Indo-Europeans or the protein content of the plaque left behind on their teeth. Until the middle of the twentieth century, this knowledge was a commonplace, familiar as much to leotard-wearing strongmen—look up the “milk and squats” diet of Joseph Hise—as to dentists, scientists, schoolmarms and your average-Joe man-in-the-street.

In his famous book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, published in 1939, Weston A. Price described how some of the healthiest, happiest people in the world built their diets around milk and milk products.

Here, for example, is his description of the high alpine Swiss of the Loetschental Valley.

“The people of the Loetschental Valley make up a community of two thousand who have been a world unto themselves. They have neither physician nor dentist because they have so little need for them; they have neither policeman nor jail, because they have no need for them. The clothing has been the substantial homespuns made from the wool of their sheep. The valley has produced not only everything that is needed for clothing, but practically everything that is needed for food. It has been the achievement of the valley to build some of the finest physiques in all Europe. This is attested to by the fact that many of the famous Swiss guards of the Vatican at Rome, who are the admiration of the world and are the pride of Switzerland, have been selected from this and other Alpine valleys. It is every Loetschental boy’s ambition to be a Vatican guard. Notwithstanding the fact that tuberculosis is the most serious disease of Switzerland, according to a statement given me by a government official, a recent report of inspection of this valley did not reveal a single case.”

Impressive—and the result of a diet that consisted of nothing but milk, cheese, butter, rye bread and small amounts of meat, bone broth and river fish.

Price had similarly wide-eyed things to say about other dairy-fed societies like the Maasai and the Nuer, who famously ate just three things: meat, milk and blood—and mainly the last two, since slaughtering their cows was a costly thing to do. These African tribes towered over neighboring cultivators, Price noted, and ruled over them too with a confidence that could only come from being, quite literally, a breed apart.

In colonial Africa, as in Bronze Age Europe, diet and domination went hand in hand.

Although science has continued to demonstrate the undoubted benefits of drinking milk—like this study that shows a strong correlation with height (i.e. more milk, more height)—milk did not escape the twentieth century’s demonization of animal foods, on account of their cholesterol and saturated-fat content, which we were now told caused heart disease, heart attacks and strokes. I wrote about this last weekend, and about the unprecedented ill health our transition away from nutrient-dense animal foods, and towards novel industrially produced foods, has caused. Instead of the renewed health they were promised, Americans became the sickest nation in the world, where 70% of the adult population is overweight or obese, and every form of chronic disease from Alzheimer’s and autism to irritable bowel syndrome becomes more prevalent with each passing year.