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People have been milking cows and other domesticated animals as well as processing and storing milk products for 2,000 years longer than originally thought, according to a new study in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
A group of scientist lead by Richard Evershed from the University of Bristol in England studied thousands of pottery shards from sites all over the Near East and the Balkans and tested them for residues of milk fats.
The researchers found that milk was already being used and processed by societies there by the seventh millennium B.C, some 2,000 years before the previous earliest evidence of milk use, although cattle, sheep and goats had already been domesticated by the eighth millennium.
Professor Evershed says traces of milk fats can survive on the pottery, even after being buried for thousands of years, as the fats do not dissolve in water and pottery is very porous and absorb organic matter.
The residues found do not indicate milk, which would decay very quickly, but more processed dairy substances, such as butter, yoghurt and ghee (clarified butter).
The researchers found the most milk fat residues in sites in Anatolia around the Sea of Marmara, now known as Turkey, which lies outside the traditional Fertile Crescent region where agriculture was first developed.
Professor Evershed because Anatolia is outside the Fertile Crescent, it also suggests that the various aspects of animal domestication did not evolve in a linear order and that some aspects, such as milk production, may have only boomed in the right places when the conditions were ripe.
(c) NewsRoom 2008
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