Lactose tolerance may have surprising roots in Europe.
Milk drinkers who can’t digest lactose experience diarrhea, gas, bloating and intestinal cramps. Those uncomfortable reactions were too mild to move the evolutionary needle toward lactose tolerance on their own, Evershed’s group says. But during periodic famines and infectious disease outbreaks, lactose-induced diarrhea became fatal for severely malnourished individuals in farming communities, the scientists suggest.
date to as early as around 7,400 years ago in Europe . If these foods were widely available, it’s unclear why lactose intolerant Europeans would not have survived times of famine or disease, Craig says. At the beginning of that time span, migrating farmers introduced dairying to southeastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, where residents embraced regular milk drinking, the investigators say. Milk use then fluctuated over time in different parts of the continent. After about 7,500 years ago, relatively heavy milk use characterized western France, northern Europe and the British Isles. Dairying occurred less often in central Europe.
Before that time, increasing levels of lactase persistence tended to align with population busts linked to famines in particular regions, the researchers report. Between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, excavated farming sites across Europe display signs ofEstimates of settlement density, a measure of how closely together people lived, also tended to decline at times of increasing lactase persistence.
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