Even though many people now do without it, milk and products made from it have been part of our daily diet for a long time. But how long has it actually been? A study now shows when milk production began in Central Europe – and who brought it to the region.
Dairy farming in Central Europe dates back at least 7400 years. This is the conclusion drawn by an international research team from the detection and dating of two fatty acids in ceramic vessels from a number of central European regions, including Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Alsace. According to this, the practice goes back to the first settlers who came from the south-east and introduced agriculture to Central Europe.
Hundreds of millions of tons of milk are produced worldwide every year, in Germany alone there were more than 33 million tons in 2020. However, little is known about the early days of dairy farming. It is believed that cattle were domesticated in the Near East more than 10,000 years ago. But how milk production spread could only be deduced indirectly in the past, for example from pictorial representations or by examining the age and sex of slaughtered cattle. This is what the team led by Emmanuelle Casanova from the University of Bristol writes in the “Proceedings” of the US National Academy of Sciences (“PNAS”).
However, it is now possible to determine the use of milk directly – by detecting stable carbon isotopes from residues of animal fatty acids in ceramic vessels. Their dating using the C14 method offers the opportunity to directly determine the beginning of dairy farming.
The scientists did this using vessels from the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) culture. This oldest peasant culture in Central Europe bears its name because of the typical decoration of vessels. It spread in Central Europe from the middle of the 6th millennium BC, especially along the large rivers such as the Danube in particular.
The team has now analyzed vessels from sites in Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands and also from Germany – here from Königshoven on the Lower Rhine. The oldest residues of milk were therefore about 7400 years old. The team emphasizes that this shows that the earliest farmers in Central Europe consumed milk on a larger scale.
“The dairy industry in Central Europe is probably as old as Linear Pottery Culture itself,” it says. “Our dating suggests that in a number of areas dairy farming was practiced from the earliest settlements and was not gradually adopted over time.”
The practice was introduced by several migration waves, tending to come from the south-east. The settlers probably came to Hungary from the Balkans, they came to Alsace through the Neckar valley and from the Danube region, while the immigrants came to the Netherlands along the Lower Rhine. The researchers suspect that there may also have been waves of immigration from the Mediterranean along the Rhone.
