Bas Payne (“BP”) spoke of how recent scientific developments had pushed back quite dramatically the date for the earliest known evidence for mankind using milk as a source of food. In the UK we now believe that milk products were being used extensively by 4,000 BC, while in Marmara (NW Turkey) recent research had pushed the date back to the period 6,500BC to 5,000BC.

A particular interest of the Turkish evidence was that in other regions of Turkey at the same time the evidence showed much less use of dairying, and this was consistent with a modern view of the Neolithic which stresses diversity – people were making very different adoptions in different circumstances. The climate in Marmara had reasonable rain fall and would have been suited to cows.

The importance of dairying was huge. A farmer with a cow of say 400Kg could obtain roughly the same number of calories from its milk through a lactation season as he could have obtained by killing the cow for meat, but the food supply would be spread out on a daily basis throughout the season, and if winter food was required the processing of milk into yoghurt or cheese was much easier and more effective than the necessary processes for preserving meat.

Although early humans are assumed to have had lactose intolerance, BP felt that this problem may have been exaggerated, as many forms of processing milk reduce the lactose content very substantially.

Our new knowledge had come mainly from the analysis of pot sherds. Where a pot had contained food, it was now possible to distinguish between vegetable or animal based food, and for animal foods meat can be distinguished from milk. Unfortunately it was still difficult to distinguish raw milk from milk processed into yoghurt or cheese. The analysis was only possible because of remarkable advances in analytical technology in recent years, since all organic molecules in such old pots are normally extremely degraded, and the lipids and other bio-chemicals in milk are particularly unstable. BP went into considerable technical detail of the methods used. Ground-up pot was placed in a very large and expensive apparatus, and signals came our regarding the proportions of organic chemicals and tiny shifts in the ratio of the two stable isotopes Carbon12 and Carbon13. These signals gave a 'fingerprint' of what food had been in the pot many thousands of years before.

This technique has been so successful in pushing back the dates of early dairying that there was now an interesting question as to whether dairying might be earlier in some regions, but our knowledge might be limited by the date at which pottery was introduced. For example, in the UK there is little pottery before 4,000BC, so it is difficult to say when the very earliest dairying started.

BP described how before this new technology, the best technique had generally been to find a site with a large number of animal bones, and analyse the relative frequencies with which animals had died at different ages. The assumption was that according to whether a farmer was raising his animals for [a] meat [b] milk [c] other uses such as wool, the the pattern of the ages at which the animals would be slaughtered would completely different.

Such was the theory, but BP described a great range of problems with this analysis. To mention just three issues:- Not all farming on the same site might be for the same purpose, if there was a feast for a special wedding or funeral then animals might be slaughtered despite the normal rules as to what was the best age pestilence might kill animals at an age not of the farmer's choosing In summary, this form of analysis had limitations, but even now that the better pottery analysis technology was available, this age profile method was still a valuable independent check on the scientific results.

Peter Brown