The anthropozoology of domestication for milk production

Milk draws its substance from a living being of flesh and blood and from plant matter full of scents, through a two-cycle digestive system and fermentation in vivo, that of ruminants, which are also animals that provide meat (“you drink my milk, you eat my meat”). The pig, the “outlaw” of domestication for milk production, escapes the rules and may be viewed in different ways, giving rise to human disagreements. The relationship involved in human suckling may go as far as the forming of language through facial communication with the mother, but it is quite different in animals. The sharing of blood through the placenta is replicated in the relation of human maternal milk to extra-specific milks, producing a special relation with the animal, a familiarity such that killing it becomes murder and requires a moral contract with a necessary higher authority to create a particular purpose for it in the institution of sacrifice. The presence of plant substance in milk relates it to plant juices and sugars (the words lactose and fructose are evocative, and lactic acid may be considered a central element), to communication effected through higher levels of perception (scents, flavours, colours) and the search for a milk tree appears as a “quest for the Holy Grail” where almond milk marks a stage; it appears, the more one goes towards the rising sun from the Occident, the more the plant metaphor, soya, plays a role.

Animal milks have been used in infant feeding for at least a few millennia, but this can only have become a common practice after the domestication of dairy animals during the Neolithic. Neolithic population increase has often been attributed to the effect of a reduction in breastfeeding duration on female fertility. It is possible, therefore, that animal milks were first introduced to the infant diet at this time as a replacement for the lost breastmilk. Milks are complex liquids and are species specific. The consumption of the milk of one species by the infants of another thus has implications for the welfare of those infants. This paper reviews some of the differences between the milks of three ruminant species and human milk and discusses what the health consequences of introducing these animal milks to the infant diet are likely to have been. It is argued that, except in extreme circumstances, animal milks would fail to adequately compensate for the reduction in breastmilk consumption. Fermented milk products could however have been valuable weaning foods if consumed alongside other iron-rich products.

Analyses of organic residues preserved in ceramic potsherds enable the identification of foodstuffs processed in archaeological vessels. Differences in the isotopic composition of fatty acids allow differentiation of non-ruminant and ruminant fats, as well as adipose and dairy fats. This paper investigates the trends in milk use in areas where sheep and goats are dominant in the faunal assemblage and in some sites from the Linearbandkeramik culture. Sites include: Colle Santo Stefano, Abruzzo, Italy, and the Oldest to Young Linearbandkeramik sites of Zwenkau, Eythra and Brodau, Saxony, and Wang and Niederhummel, Bavaria, Germany. More than 160 potsherds were investigated including cooking pots, bowls, jars, and ceramic sieves. The lipid residues presented provide direct evidence for the processing of ruminant and non-ruminant commodities at Zwenkau and Eythra, despite the absence of faunal remains at the sites. No dairy residues were detected in potsherds from LBK sites, except in a ceramic sieve at Brodau. Lipids from non-ruminant and ruminant fats, including from dairy fats, were detected at the site of Colle Santo Stefano showing a reliance on dairy products during the first half of the sixth millennium at this site; where sheep and goats were the major domestic animals.

Routes of migration and exchange are important factors in the debate about how the Neolithic transition spread into Europe. Studying the genetic diversity of livestock can help in tracing back some of these past events. Notably, domestic goat (Capra hircus) did not have any wild progenitors (Capra aegagrus) in Europe before their arrival from the Near East. Studies of mitochondrial DNA have shown that the diversity in European domesticated goats is a subset of that in the wild, underlining the ancestral relationship between both populations. Additionally, an ancient DNA study on Neolithic goat remains has indicated that a high level of genetic diversity was already present early in the Neolithic in northwestern Mediterranean sites. We used coalescent simulations and approximate Bayesian computation, conditioned on patterns of modern and ancient mitochondrial DNA diversity in domesticated and wild goats, to test a series of simplified models of the goat domestication process. Specifically, we ask if domestic goats descend from populations that were distinct prior to domestication. Although the models we present require further analyses, preliminary results indicate that wild and domestic goats are more likely to descend from a single ancestral wild population that was managed 11,500 years before present, and that serial founding events characterise the spread of Capra hircus into Europe.

This paper discusses the archaeozoological evidence from Neolithic Ulucak Höyük (İzmir, ca. 7000–5700 cal. BC) in light of current debates on early dairy technologies. The paper aims to add new dimension to the current understanding of the role western Anatolia played in the evolution of early animal husbandry systems towards wider applications of dairy technologies. The evidence from Ulucak can potentially shed important new information on how these technologies were exchanged across the European-Anatolian frontier. To explore the appearance and evolution of milk use at Ulucak, the paper evaluates two main lines of archaeozoological data: mortality profiles — the most tangible archaeozoological evidence to detect the ways in which domestic animals were exploited (Payne 1973; Vigne and Helmer 2007), and diachronic changes in the contribution of cattle to subsistence economy, with reference to Evershed et al. (2008)'s proposal about a cattle-dairy link in northwestern Turkey. Results from Neolithic Ulucak are assessed in the context of relevant evidence from neighbouring sites in western Anatolia.

This review of documentary sources, particularly from Early Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and Europe seeks to show how the range of dairy products varied in different areas and to demonstrate that in many societies, cows and dairying played an important role in early religious practice. The range of dairy products consumed also varied greatly between different societies and the use of milk did not automatically imply that dairying technology was applied to its full potential. Also, in some cultures the consumption of milk was confined to certain sections of society.