In the beginning: The stunning arrival of dairying and cheesemaking

 

Previously in Cheese, Culture and Beyond, I argued that six prerequisites had to be fulfilled before dairying and then cheesemaking could be discovered and assimilated into the subsistence strategy of a local community for the first time. Let’s now try to reconstruct the story of cheesemaking’s origin during the early Neolithic. The story begins around 11,500 years ago (9500 BC) at an archeological site in Southwest Asia known as Göbekli Tepe. This site is located near the crest of the Fertile Crescent around the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Southeast Anatolia, or what is now modern Turkey. Göbekli Tepe was discovered only about 3 decades ago, and ever since then, it has stunned the archaeological world because of the massive temple complex that is buried at the site, which was built by Paleolithic/Old Stone Age hunter-foragers.

The temple complex consists of massive stone pillars, up to 18 feet in height, and weighing between 10 to 50 tons, arranged in circular enclosures, 5 of which have been unearthed with evidently several more still buried beneath the surface, that remain to be excavated. I like to think of Göbekli Tepe as a Stonehenge on steroids type of site, but it’s important to note that this amazingly sophisticated temple complex preceded Stonehenge by 6,000 years. And everything about the site, its engineering complexity, its social, cultural and spiritual complexity, all point to an abrupt and fundamental advancement in the cognitive development of these Paleolithic hunter-foragers. It has been posited that this quantum leap in imaginative capacity then enabled these Paleolithic pioneers to discover agriculture for the first time, thereby ushering in the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, in Southwest Asia.

Now amazingly, around the same time that Göbekli Tepe was being constructed, the earth’s climate had changed abruptly and dramatically. For our purposes, I simply want to focus on the most recent 11,500 years of climate history, which is called the Holocene climate era, the current climate era that we are in today. The Holocene began with a sudden rise in global temperature, totaling around 17 degrees Fahrenheit on average, and then unexpectedly, the climate stabilized, which then blessed this planet with a warm, moist, consistent, human-friendly climate that created the possibility for humans to pursue agriculture for the first time! During the Pleistocene, which preceded the Holocene, the earth’s climate was much colder on average than today and subject to constant wild swings in global temperature, creating a very chaotic and harsh environment that ruled out any possibility of agriculture. Furthermore, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were very low relative to today, and indeed may have been too low during the Pleistocene to support widespread growth of the ancestors of the cereal grains and legumes that would eventually become the backbone of Neolithic agriculture in Southwest Asia.

However, by around 11,000 years ago, or 9000 BC, the climate had warmed and stabilized, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had increased substantially, and wild cereals such as wheat, rye and barley and legumes such as beans, peas and lentils became genetically adapted to thrive in this new “Mediterranean” climate that rendered the Fertile Crescent fertile. Eventually, extensive stands of wild cereals were established in an elongated swath extending from the Jordan River valley northwards through inland Syria into what is now southeastern Turkey; what happened next was like a series of dominoes falling in sequence. Agriculture was discovered near the crest of the Fertile Crescent (roughly in the neighborhood of the Göbekli Tepe site), and agriculture immediately began to be practiced in earnest for the first time. The first agricultural experimentation involved crop cultivation and then the domestication of cereals and legumes, but within 500 years (8500 BC), livestock indigenous to the region (sheep and goats) were being herded and domesticated.

Sheep and goats were the ideal livestock to give rise to dairying and cheesemaking: gregarious and human-friendly, amenable to milking, generous (relatively) milk production capacity, and milk possessing magnificent coagulation properties were essential prerequisites to what would happen next. Within another 500 years (8000 BC), sheep, goats, and then cattle were being raised for milk production, and so began dairying. Very soon thereafter, cheesemaking commenced. These rapid developments, in turn, gave rise to a new sedentary mixed agricultural subsistence strategy among Fertile Crescent communities that combined crop cultivation with animal husbandry.

The development of sedentary mixed farming quickly fueled population growth which spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and brought profound cultural changes that marked a turning point in human prehistory, the blossoming of the Neolithic or New Stone Age. Now, humans were beginning to exercise new and significant control over nature rather than simply responding to the natural world, as had been the case up to this point. The onset of spirituality had even greater implications, for now humans possessed a unique perception of their place in the world, and, with it, a unique potential to alter and exercise dominion over creation itself. This blossoming spiritual dimension of humanity also had profound implications for dairying and cheesemaking.  Cheese history would soon intersect with the emergence of early Neolithic religious practices that would eventually give rise to and underpin complex spiritual belief systems of civilizations to follow, both western and eastern, which will be the topic of a future post.

There was also an ominous side to the Neolithic revolution, namely unbridled population growth due to shorter birthing intervals. The birthing interval, or average time between episodes of childbirth, is strongly influenced by the nursing mother’s energy balance, which is governed by her energy expenditure on milk production and physical activity versus her energy intake from the diet. In Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities, the energy expenditure of nursing mothers was very high due to the rigors of constant mobility and child transport, combined with the energy requirements for milk production. Furthermore, energy intake of the Paleolithic diet was low due to the scarcity of carbohydrate-rich plant foods such as cereals and legumes. High energy expenditure and low energy intake inevitably extended the recovery time needed for the next pregnancy, thereby extending the birthing interval and limiting the fertility rates of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities.

In contrast, the Neolithic revolution immediately afforded nursing mothers much more favorable energy balance status in the form of less energy expended due to the sedentary way of life, plus greater energy intake from the addition of cultivated cereals and legumes in the diet. In addition, Neolithic young girls also enjoyed more positive energy balance as they approached puberty compared to their hunter-gatherer counterparts, enabling an earlier onset of menstruation that extended their reproductive life span.

All of this naturally favored a surge in sexual activity and shorter intervals between births. Thus, the Neolithic revolution brought great increase in the pain of childbirth for women over the course of their reproductive lives, unleashing an estimated rise in average fertility rate from around 4.5 children per woman during the late Paleolithic (just before the Neolithic) to 10 children as the Neolithic took hold. Such dramatic increase in fertility, in turn, placed Neolithic communities on a perpetual treadmill of needing to maintain and expand agricultural output to keep pace with population growth. Furthermore, as Neolithic communities grew in population and complexity and small villages gave way to fortified (walled) towns, disease set in that was associated with living in close contact with domesticated animals, poor sanitation, the ubiquitous presence of rodents, and tainted water, which lowered life expectancy. Soon, death by plague on a widespread communal scale began to be experienced as never before, etching new understandings of mortality, the afterlife, and spiritual yearning into the Neolithic psyche.

Furthermore, the environmental toll from population growth and the unsustainable agricultural practices of these first farmers became a limiting factor to food security among these communities from the beginning, creating new challenges. Yes, the Fertile Crescent is fertile compared to much of the surrounding geography, which includes dry rangelands and deserts, but it is also a very fragile environment, subject to crop failures. The mastery of livestock domestication, dairying and cheesemaking must have been viewed as very welcome additions to the local crop-based subsistence strategy, an insurance policy that helped mitigate the trauma of inconsistent crop yields and outright crop failure.

Precisely when did the harvesting of milk from livestock for human consumption begin, and when did cheesemaking commence? Until recently it was widely believed that livestock in Southwest Asia were initially domesticated solely for their meat, hides and other products resulting from the animals’ slaughter. However, advances in archaeozoological and archaeochemical sciences have recently shown that dairying was practiced almost from the beginning. For example, analyses of livestock bone and dental remains indicate that, as early as the late nineth millennium BC, Neolithic communities were likely engaged in milk production. The practice of dairying appears to have then spread rapidly beyond the initial areas of origin, such that by the early 8th millennium BC, Neolithic migrants from the northern Levantine mainland had transported domesticated sheep and goats to Cyprus, where some of the animals were raised for milk production. Indeed, it now seems plausible that the harvesting of milk for human consumption may have been among the original reasons that inspired Neolithic farmers to domesticate ruminant livestock in the first place.

The first Neolithic efforts at harvesting milk were likely targeted towards the feeding of young children, for whom animal milk was an invaluable supplemental food during the weaning period, which lasted until the child was two or three years old, rather than towards the adult population. Why not the adults? Because milk contains a high concentration of lactose or milk sugar, the digestion of which requires the production of the enzyme lactase in the gut, which enables the newborn to digest their mother’s milk. However, lactase production normally declines in mammals after weaning and does not persist into adulthood. Therefore, when Neolithic adults consumed liquid milk, lactose remained undigested and disrupted the gut microbiota, triggering several unwelcome side effects such as diarrhea, flatulence and bloating.

Consequently, when milk was first harvested in the Fertile Crescent around the end of the nineth millennium BC, and for several millennia thereafter, adult lactose intolerance was virtually universal among adult humans. It would take several millennia of intense genetic selection for adult lactase persistence (lactose tolerance) to make inroads among some human populations. In contrast, for young Neolithic children progressing towards weaning, the addition of animal milk to the diet immediately afforded a powerful survival advantage by enhancing their nutritional status at this critical stage of development. Indeed, once the technology for producing pottery was perfected during the seventh millennium BC, it didn’t take long for innovative Neolithic communities to devise ceramic “baby bottles” that were used to feed their toddlers as they progressed towards weaning, and which probably continued for a period beyond weaning, until the child’s lactase production shut down.  Post-weaning exposure of toddlers to animal milk undoubtedly exerted enormous selection pressure favoring the genetic mutation that enabled lactase persistence and adult lactose tolerance to eventually gain a foothold and spread among populations thereafter.

Once the harvesting of animal milk for human consumption had commenced in the warm environment of Southwest Asia, Neolithic communities would have encountered the phenomenon of spontaneous acid coagulation soon thereafter. In such warm climates, milk that was harvested and stored unused for several hours would have fermented quickly and coagulated spontaneously due to the production of lactic acid by bacteria that are always naturally present in milk environments. Therefore, Neolithic farmers likely confronted the spontaneous and mysterious process of milk coagulation soon after they began to harvest milk during the late nineth millennium BC.

The fragility of the coagulated milk and its tendency separate into soft solid curds and liquid whey when fractured and stirred would have become quickly evident, and it was only a matter of time before Neolithic pastoralists discovered that adults were able to consume the drained curds in modest amounts without developing the unpleasant symptoms that they experienced when they drank milk. The reason behind this is that much of the lactose in milk is fermented to lactic acid and removed with the whey when milk undergoes acid coagulation and the whey is drained from the curds. Therefore, the concentration of lactose in the drained curds (fresh cheese) is much lower than it is in liquid milk, rendering the cheese more digestible for lactose-intolerant adults.

Once the value of coagulating the milk and draining the whey was recognized, it is easy to imagine that curiosity and experimentation led to the discovery that this mysterious process was more consistent and led to better outcomes when a small amount of the previous batch of whey was added to newly harvested milk, the first starter culture! The resulting curds could be consumed fresh or salted and dried in the sun to preserve them for future use, as is still widely practiced today among traditional pastoral communities, providing considerable survival value in times of famine.

This was a watershed period for the human species, because nature affords no better insurance policy against food insecurity than: 1) grass, which grows under the most extreme conditions when all else fails, and 2) ruminants, which can survive under the most extreme conditions, and which convert grass into the nature’s most magnificent food for mammals (including humans), milk. The remarkable effectiveness of that insurance policy was not lost on these first farmers even as regional environmental collapse and soon thereafter, catastrophic climatic events, loomed in the future that would stress these communities to near breaking point and trigger mass migrations out of the Fertile Crescent in all directions. We will examine those mass migrations, and the profound role that they played in the history of cheesemaking and history of humanity in the next posts, The Great Dispersal, Parts 1-3.