Our human ancestors made cheese & dairy products over 7,000 years ago

HUMANS MILKED COWS OVER 7,000 YEARS AGO
Milk products may be why the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was given up in favor of a more settled, and yogurt-eating, existence.

By Emily Sohn
Discovery News
Wed Jun 20, 2012 01:00 PM ET

THE GIST

• People were processing dairy products in the African Sahara more than 7,000 years ago.
• The first dairy farmers lived in Anatolia, now modern-day Turkey.
• Dairy farming may have pushed people to settle down.

This rock art image of domesticated cattle, between 5,000 and 8,000 years old, comes from the Wadi Imha, in the Tadrart Acacus Mountains, Libyan Sahara. Click to enlarge this image.

Roberto Ceccacci, © The Archaeological Mission in the Sahara, Sapienza University of Rome

More than 7,000 years ago, prehistoric people in the African Sahara were making dairy products, such as butter, yogurt and cheese.

The discovery, based on the identification of dairy fats on ancient pottery shards found in Libya, is the first to provide a definitive date for early dairy farming in Africa. Adding to findings from Europe and the Middle East, the study points to milk products as a main reason why people in many places may have chosen to give up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor of a more settled existence.

“What we’re really beginning to know is that cattle were incredibly significant to early peoples,” said Julie Dunne, an archaeological scientist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “They gave a remarkably calorific source of food and allowed populations to expand dramatically. Milk and dairying seem to be so significant in human development, remarkably so.”

Plenty of research has documented the domestication of sheep, goats and cattle, as well as the use of dairy products, beginning around 9,000 years ago in parts of modern-day Turkey, 8,000 years ago in eastern Europe and 6,000 years ago in Britain.

In Africa, details have been murkier. Fossil evidence suggests the arrival of domesticated milk-producers in North Africa by about 8,000 years ago with an increase in animal numbers over the next 1,000 years, but remains are spotty. And even though archaeologists have discovered vivid rock art depicting cattle and even milking scenes in Algeria and other parts of the Sahara, it is impossible to accurately date those paintings.

For the new study, Dunne and colleagues analyzed organic residues on 81 well-dated pieces of pottery taken from the Takarkori rock shelter in the Libyan Sahara. The samples turned out to be incredibly well preserved, containing fat residues at high concentrations, probably because of the region’s dry conditions -- though the climate there was much wetter during the period considered in the new study.

Evidence showed that some pots were used to hold plant oils. But many contained chemical signatures that were unambiguously from animal fats, the researchers report today in the journal Nature. Analyses revealed the remains of dairy products made from cow, goat and sheep’s milk, dating back to between 7,200 and 5,800 years ago.

At that time, Africans had not yet developed the genetic mutations that allow people to digest milk, according to other research. So, the Sahara’s lactose-intolerant dairy farmers were likely making yogurt and cheese rather than drinking straight from the udders of their animals. Only after people learned to process dairy foods did their bodies develop the ability to drink pure milk -- through mutations that appear to have happened independently as many as three or four times in Africa.

It is now becoming clear that dairying was a transformative development in human history, said Joachim Burger, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Mainz in Germany. Given their carbohydrate and nutrient profiles, dairy products would have been far superior to what people could get from hunting and gathering alone. And when our ancestors figured that out, society changed forever.

“The general question behind all this is what actually made man to become sedentary and change his lifestyle completely,” Burger said. “Milk is not just a side effect of this change. It may even be a driving force behind it.”

Huge underground water aquifers discovered in North Africa...will this start the re-colonization of Africa or has it started with AFRICOM?

We'll drink to that: Massive underground reserves of water found in some of Africa's driest areas - including the Sahara Desert
Researchers estimate that reserves of groundwater across the continent are 100 times the amount found on its surface

By TED THORNHILL
DailyMail
April 21, 2012

Huge reserves of underground water in some of the driest parts of Africa could provide a buffer against the effects of climate change for years to come, scientists said.

Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London have for the first time mapped the aquifers, or groundwater, across the continent and the amount they hold.

‘The largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan,’ the scientists said in their paper.

Revelation: Scientists have mapped Africa's underground water reserves

They estimate that reserves of groundwater across the continent are 100 times the amount found on its surface, or 0.66 million cubic kilometres.

Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, they cautioned, though, that not all these reserves can be accessed.

Where they can, small-scale extraction using hand pumps would be better than large-scale drilling projects, which could quickly deplete the reservoirs and have other unforeseen consequences.

Groundwater is no panacea for Africa's water shortages but it could form an important part of a strategy to cope with an expected sharp increase in demand for water as the continent's population increases.

Even now, some estimates put the number of Africans without access to safe drinking water at more than 300 million and only 5 per cent of arable land is irrigated.

‘It is not as simple as drilling big bore holes and seeing rice fields spring up everywhere,’ said Dr Stephen Foster, a London-based senior adviser for aid group Global Water Partnership and an expert in groundwater issues.

‘In some places it could be economically and technically feasible to use groundwater to reduce crop loss, but I would question whether that is true everywhere. It will need detailed evaluation.
Foster noted that projects have failed due to cost and logistics problems.

‘In northern Nigeria there have been groundwater irrigation projects that have failed because of the rising cost of fuel - a major factor in drilling costs - and distribution difficulties.’

The researchers say some of the largest deposits are in the driest areas of Africa in and around the Sahara, but they are deep - at 100 to 250 meters below ground level.

‘Water levels deeper than 50 meters will not be able to be accessed easily by a hand pump,’ said the study, led by Dr Alan MacDonald of the British Geological Survey. ‘At depths greater than 100 meters the cost of borehole drilling increases significantly due to the requirement for more sophisticated drilling equipment.’

The amount of water a borehole yields is another key issue. A small community hand pump needs a borehole with a flow rate of 0.1 to 0.3 litres per second. For large-scale irrigation, the rate needs to be much higher, say around 50 litres.

Dry research: It turns out that the biggest reserves of underground water are found near the Sahara Desert. Photo credit: Dailymail/Alamy

Phoebe White, a water, sanitation and hygiene specialist for the UK Department for International Development based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, said hand pumps in the DRC cost up to $13,000 apiece but in some areas the aquifers are too deep and other pumps must be used.

In areas of DRC where drilling deep boreholes is required the cost can be around $130,000, although problems of accessibility and infrastructure can push that figure up, according to White.

The researchers say the maps, based on existing geological charts from governments and hundreds of aquifer studies, are aimed at promoting a ‘more realistic assessments of water security and water stress’.

Roger Calow at UK think-tank the Overseas Development Institute, which was involved in the program that spawned the research, said the paper shows water shortages in large parts of Africa do not stem from scarcity.

‘What the science is telling us is that we have more storage in these shallow, relatively unproductive (aquifers) than we thought,’ he said, adding that about 60 per cent of Africans still live in rural areas and 80 per cent of those rely on groundwater systems.

Calow said a third of hand pumps across Africa have broken down due to a lack of maintenance.

Aid agencies gave the research a cautious welcome.

‘The discovery of substantial water reserves under parts of Africa may well be good news for the continent but it may prove hard to access in the near term and, if not sustainably managed, could have unforeseen impacts,’ Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi.

Nuttall said over-abstraction exploitation of groundwater in Mexico City, for example, is undermining the foundations of buildings.

He said the focus of efforts to improve water supply should be on better collection and storage.
‘The fact is that there is already a tremendous amount of water available for Africa but it is rarely collected’.

A study by UNEP and the World Agroforestry Centre found there is enough water falling as rain over Africa to supply the needs of some 9 billion people.

‘Ethiopia, where just over a fifth of the population are covered by domestic water supply and an estimated 46 per cent of the population suffer hunger, has a potential rainwater harvest equivalent to the population needs of over 520 million people,’ Nuttall told Reuters.