Traces in the tartar have provided clues as to how people from the western Eurasian steppe were able to cover such enormous distances in the early Bronze Age: milk may have been decisive in strengthening it. According to the analysis results, mare’s milk was also consumed in the Pontic-Caspian region, which the scientists interpret as an indication that there was a hotspot of horse domestication there.
In the early Bronze Age there were many developments that would have a lasting impact on human history in Eurasia. This also included the major migratory movements. The study by the researchers led by Shevan Wilkin from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Man in Jena (MPI-SHH) focused on the expansion of population groups from the western Eurasian steppe around 5000 years ago. Its astonishingly extensive spread in northern Eurasia is reflected in archaeological and genetic findings: The influence of these so-called Yamnaya shepherds ultimately linked populations from Scandinavia to Mongolia.
Diet change is emerging
It has already been assumed that the use of wagons and horses as well as improved nutrition through optimizations in the mobile pastoral economy have played a role in the success of these people spreading. In addition to the increased supply of meat, milk could also have increasingly enriched the menu. But so far there has been no direct evidence for this assumption. To provide them, Wilkin and her colleagues have now used a special source of information: They analyzed tartar from human remains that were found in the Pontic-Caspian region and come from the relevant period. Traces of the former foods have been preserved in it, which can be assigned to certain products using modern research methods.
“A clear pattern emerged in our results,” reports Wilkin: 90 percent of the individuals examined before the Bronze Age showed no evidence of milk consumption. But with the beginning of the new age, this changed significantly: the researchers found traces of milk in the tartar in 94 percent of the individuals from the early Bronze Age. Apparently milk or fermented milk products had increasingly found their way into the diet of these people. To what extent these foods contributed to the increased mobility of the shepherds remains unclear, but evidently the migration flows correlated with the change in diet: “We are observing a transition to dairy at the precise point in time when the pastoralists began to spread eastwards,” says senior author Nicole Boivin from the MPI-SHH.
Strengthened by milk – even from horses
The advantages of milk consumption are obvious: the researchers suspect that the additional nutrients and the high protein and liquid content of milk in a particularly dry environment have improved the chances of survival in the harsh steppe climate. “We’re seeing a kind of cultural revolution here. After the early shepherds of the Bronze Age saw the benefits of milk, the steppe was never like it was before, ”says Wilkin.
The researchers also looked into the question of which animals the consumed milk came from: “The differences between the milk peptides of different species are small, but an assignment is still possible,” explains Wilkin. It turned out that, as expected, most traces came from cow, sheep and goat milk. Interestingly, in some cases the scientists were also able to demonstrate the consumption of mare’s milk.
Accordingly, the people of the Pontic-Caspian steppe apparently used horses not only for locomotion, but also as milk suppliers. The researchers interpret this intensive use as an indication of the still unclear history of domestication of the horse in Eurasia. “Our results suggest a possible center of horse domestication in the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the third millennium BC. BC “, write the scientists.
Source: Max Planck Institute for the History of Man, specialist article: Nature, doi: 10.1038 / s41586-021-03798-4