Milchtrinkers Uber Alles

Germany had a very interesting weekend. While an art exhibit exploring the wider cultural climate that allowed for Hitler’s rise to power opened at the German Historical Museum, Angela Merkel declared that the country’s attempt at multiculturalism had “failed utterly,” seemingly aligning herself with harder-right voices in the government that have reacted to a growing population of Middle Eastern Muslims by pushing for a tightening of immigration laws and enforcing a “dominant German culture.” And also, Der Spiegel’s Matthias Shulz wrote this great article on the recent findings of the “Leche” project-an international evolutionary biological study established “to genetically probe the beginnings of butter, milk and cheese”-that is oddly related to those first two things.

Sawing into human bones from the neolithic period, studying chromosomal evidence of lactose tolerance and the lack thereof, the scientists at the Leche project are changing long-held beliefs about European hunter-gatherer societies’ shift to sedentary agrarianism between 5,600 B.C. and 5,200 B.C. (And surely making milk the next comestible to get the “driving force of civilization” treatment in book form, like salt, cod, corn, sugar, etc.) Farming methodology-sowing seeds, milking cattle, etc.-was invented in the middle east, in the fertile crescent. Academics have long believed that it had been brought to Europe by small groups of wanderers and spread in what German archeologist Jens Lüning described as a spirit of “peaceful cooperation.”

Apparently, that was not the case. Rather, starting, around 7,000 B.C. Central Europe was flooded by a mass migration of middle-eastern farmers who brought their own livestock and did not intermingle or procreate with the area’s original inhabitants-in fact, there was violent conflict. As Shulz writes:

“The settlers, wielding their sickles, kept moving farther and farther north, right into the territory of backward peoples. The newcomers were industrious and used to working hard in the fields. Clay statues show that the men were already wearing trousers and shaving. The women dyed their hair red and decorated it with snail shells. Both sexes wore caps, and the men also wore triangular hats. By comparison, the more primitive existing inhabitants of the continent wore animal hides and lived in spartan huts. They looked on in bewilderment as the newcomers deforested their hunting grounds, tilled the soil and planted seeds. This apparently upset them and motivated them to resist the intruders.”

It turned out Europe’s lush vegetation and cooler climates suited diary farming well, and a population explosion among these original Middle Eastern immigrants seeded Europe with its healthy, strong-boned milk-fed future.