Milk consumption in Eurasian Neolithisation

The paper focuses on modelling the process of neolithisation, as well as on evolutionary and cultural changes in prehistory. It also examines the ways in which culture extends biology, and how biology, in turn, is extended through culture. The development of theory in evolutionary biology predates its application in archaeology. While Herbert Spencer’s versions of evolution became an integral part of the ’New Archaeology’ through Lewis Binford, parallel research by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, as well as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, introduced mathematically modelled cultural processes in prehistory based on Darwinian principles. These scholars proposed that humans possess a second inheritance system – culture – in addition to their genetic inheritance. They also developed mathematical models to demonstrate how innovations and cultural practices, such as livestock domestication and dairying, could have modified selection pressures on human genes and drive evolutionary change during the early Neolithic. The example of lactase persistence is often taken as representative of the hypothesized interactions between cultural traits and genes within frameworks such as ‘gene–culture coevolution’ and ‘cultural niche construction’. However, we highlight a paradox: the earliest significant increase in the frequency of alleles associated with lactase persistence in Europe does not appear before the mid-third millennium BC. Lactic acid bacteria, which metabolize lactose into lactic acid and thereby reduce lactose content, may have enabled Neolithic populations to consume fermented rather than fresh milk, and can therefore be considered part of the ’Neolithic package’. What spread across Europe during the Early Neolithic was not lactase persistence itself (allele −13,910*T) in the contexts of ‘dual inheritance transmission’, ‘gene-culture coevolution’ and ‘demic diffusion’, but a technology of milk processing based on controlled fermentation intentionally processed by lactic acid bacteria