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Re: milk and human sociobiology
Paul J. Gans (gans@scholar.nyu.edu)
29 Jan 1997 04:48:04 GMT
Robert Snower (rs222@worldnet.att.net) wrote:
: geroldf@sdd.hp.com (Gerold Firl) wrote:
:
: >In article <5cbcic$dt0@mtinsc04.worldnet.att.net>, rs222@worldnet.att.net (Robert Snower) writes:
:
: >|> geroldf@sdd.hp.com (Gerold Firl) wrote:
:
: >|> >"In Sherratt's view (A.G. Sherratt, in I.
: >|> >Hodder, et. al., eds,, _patterns of the past_, cambridge uni. press,
: >|> >1981, and personal communication, 1982), developments from scattered
: >|> >places were gathered together in northern mesopotamia (or at any rate
: >|> >on the fringe of the fertile cresent)c. 6000 years ago, as a package
: >|> >in which the plow was the salient invention. Thence it radiated north,
: >|> >south, east and west, in association with the milk-drinking mutation."
: >|> > "Almost all mammals lose the ability to digest milk sugar
: >|> >(lactose) after infancy, and milk is then harmful to them; the same is
: >|> >true for most human beings." (Nigel Calder, _timescale_, 1983, p.
:
: >|> I think all of you are all wet. I just called the zoo. The man
: >|> assured me that they feed all of the adult chimps and gorillas milk
: >|> every week, and he has never found any of them lactose intolerant.
: >|>
: >|> I believe lactose intolerance began, as an adaptation, in hominids and
: >|> is not characteristic of our primate relatives. And I know the reason
: >|> why, and nobody else does.
: >|>
: >|> The oddballs are humans, not mammals in general. Lactose tolerance is
: >|> the normal condition.
:
: >If so, it seems very strange that the only human groups which are not
: >lactose intolerant (LI) are those which have recently (in the last few
: >thousand years) begun keeping domesticated herds. The cultures which
: >do not keep domesticated ungulates all evolved LI, according to your
: >theory; did the lactose tolerant groups then re-evolve this trait, or
: >simply never lost it in the first place?
:
: The lactose tolerant groups re-evolved this trait. Hominids became,
: remarkably enough, lactose intolerant in the same way ancient peoples
: often developed intolerances to prohibited food--to the eating of the
: sacred animal, the "unclean" animal or plant, the totem animal or
: plant. The most universal eating prohibition, of all the great
: variety of them, was, in the primordial hominid culture, the real or
: imagined adult drinking of milk, as a derivative of the maternal
: incest taboo (cf. Mark Shapiro's *The Sociobiology of Homo Sapiens*
: 1978). This incest prohibition, concurrent with the deliberate
: temptation, was highly adaptive, accounting for the expansion from
: biological kinship to the first cohesive society. Until that device,
: no mammalian society was able to transcend a cohesion based primarily
: on generational kinship.
Wow. I'd need to run this by an evolutionary biologist
before I'd buy into it.
------ Paula J. Gans [gans@scholar.chem.nyu.edu]
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