Earliest milk processing: the dawn of dairying
- Date
- c. 6500–6000 BCE
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Anatolia and Southeast Europe
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
The exploitation of animals for renewable 'secondary products' rather than only meat began with milk.
Lipid residue analysis of Neolithic pottery shows that dairy fats were being processed in vessels in northwestern Anatolia by the seventh millennium BCE, with a particularly intensive dairy economy at sites such as Barcın Höyük by around 6600 BCE, where most analysed vessels carried milk residues. Milking turned cattle, sheep and goats into ongoing sources of nutrition, and the processing of milk into yoghurt and cheese — lower in lactose — allowed largely lactose-intolerant early farmers to consume dairy before the genetic trait of adult lactase persistence became common. Dairying spread with the Neolithic into southeastern and central Europe over the following millennia. It marked an early step in what the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the 'Secondary Products Revolution,' shifting the human relationship with livestock from slaughter toward sustained, renewable yields.
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Further reading
The wider story
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