Apparently, the earliest adult milk drinkers came from central Europe and not from the sun-starved Scandinavian regions. Northern Europeans, unlike more than half the world’ s populations are highly lactose tolerant.
I have to question this research since many older African cultures such as the Maasai and the Ndebele tribes, traditional cattle herding peoples who have been, or appear to have been, milk consumers for a very long time. Some claim that pastoralism may have emerged independently of agriculture in a region in central Africa.
Be interesting to see how this research develops as there is a debate about the India sub-continent in the comments of the article – http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17704-central-europeans-were-first-adults-to-drink-milk.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news. Could it be that lactose tolerance developed separately in different populations, maybe as a mutation of a common gene?
