The Great Dispersal, Part 3: The Push and Pull of Climate Instability – Eastward Migration

 

Previously, in Part 2 of The Great Dispersal, we considered the westward migratory routes that Anatolian first farmers and cheesemakers trailblazed into the heart of Europe following the catastrophic 6200 BC climate event. In Part 3 we now turn to a concurrent migratory route that proceeded north from the Balkan Peninsula and then turned east. There, the Anatolian refugees arrived at the western terminus of the expansive and daunting grasslands of the Eurasian steppe. They settled there along the fringes of the steppe, northwest of the Black Sea, where they resumed their sedentary mixed agricultural way of life. Ultimately, this proved to be the first in a series of developments that led to a new form of mobile pastoralism on the steppe, highly dependent on the horse, as well as livestock herding, dairying and cheesemaking.

By around 5800 BC, this group of Anatolian refugees had established a network of farming communities across the region that depended on grain cultivation and small-scale herding and dairying, forming the Criş culture. Thus, dairying and cheesemaking made their debut at the western terminus of a grassland sea that extended some 5300 miles from the Danube delta of the western Black Sea to the region of the Great Wall of China. To their east, indigenous hunter-forager peoples populated the northern fringes of the Pontic-Caspian steppe at the interface with the vast forests of Russia to the north. Thus, two strikingly different cultural groups found themselves juxtaposed along the northern fringes of the eastern Eurasian steppe: The Neolithic sedentary farmers of the Criş culture and the Paleolithic hunter-foragers.

So began the eastward march of dairying and cheesemaking. The initial movement was not through population migration but rather cultural diffusion. Over the course of the next millennium, Criş farming communities attracted the attention of the indigenous hunter-forager peoples to their east. The latter progressively assimilated the mixed agricultural subsistence strategy of their western neighbors, thereby drawing agriculture ever eastwards for more than a thousand miles along the forest-steppe interface as indigenous hunter-forager peoples imitated their neighbors to the west and settled down to become farmers. By the start of the fifth millennium BC, mixed agriculture based on grain cultivation, small-scale herding and dairying had diffused to the Dnieper River and continued east to the Volga and Ural Rivers, creating a vast new Neolithic cultural zone at the forest- steppe interface.

The steppe remained largely uninhabited during this period. Human communities had not yet developed strategies to survive out on the grasslands, although hunting on foot occurred regularly. The horse, however, would soon usher in new survival strategies that would open up the steppe to full-time human habitation. Horses are native to the Eurasian steppe and superbly adapted to the harsh, dry, cold steppe environment. The assimilation of livestock herding and domestication practices along the forest-steppe interface likely sparked the first experiments with horse herding for purposes of securing a winter supply of meat and for symbolic use in funerary rites by around the end of the fifth millennium BC.

However, it would take a wrenching climatic shift associated with the Piora Oscillation, around 4200–3800 BC, to bring the full potential of the synergy between horse, livestock and dairying into focus. The Piora Oscillation, the second in the series of periodic (roughly every 1500 years) climatic fluxes mentioned earlier in Part 2, resulted in bitterly cold winters along the steppe, with temperatures falling to levels lower than at any time since the 6200 BCE event. Horses are far better adapted to survive severe winters than are livestock because horses instinctively use their hooves to break through ice and deep snow to reach water and grass beneath and can graze through the winter without fodder or water. Eventually, farmers along the steppe fringes realized that by herding horses along with their livestock, the horses would help to open up the grass under deep snow and ice and lead the way for grazing livestock to follow.

Thus, farmers began to rely more heavily on the synergy between horse and livestock. During the relatively mild climatic conditions that returned around 3700 BC following the Piora Oscillation, farming communities continued to expand their reliance on the horse, ushering in a new era of population mobility and the first large-scale eastward population migration. This migratory surge brought Neolithic farmers, their cattle, sheep, horses and dairying practices to the western Altai Mountain region of southern Siberia, the gateway to Mongolia, by around 3700–3400 BC. The newcomers remained culturally separate from the surrounding hunter-forager peoples, with little inter-breeding taking place. However, movement back and forth between the Ural frontier and the Siberian Altai continued for centuries, infusing new forms of pastoralism and dairying practices and eventually becoming a conduit for mobile herding practices that would profoundly reshape the survival strategy of their hunter-forager neighbors in Mongolia.

Back on the western steppe at this time, innovative new ways to herd, domesticate, and ride horses, and harvest milk for human consumption, were being perfected in the region of northern Kazakhstan. Horse-riding techniques then evidently spread to neighboring Neolithic farming communities, enabling farmers to oversee larger herds of cattle on horseback with greater mobility to search for fresh grazing. Shortly thereafter, a period of climactic drying across the Pontic-Caspian steppe set in around 3500 to 3000 BC, creating new stresses on farmers as drought threatened their crops, forests receded northward and were replaced by steppe, and steppe vegetation became more and more fragile and vulnerable to overgrazing. Farmers on the steppe fringes found themselves more reliant than ever on grazing larger herds of livestock, moving them more frequently over wider swaths of rangeland in search of fresh grass, with mobility becoming central to survival in the warmer, drier environment of the steppe.

It was during this time of climatic stress that the wheeled wagon entered the scene. Precisely where this monumental innovation originated is still a matter of scholarly debate, but once the wheeled wagon arrived the elements for a new culture based overwhelmingly on mobile pastoralism were now in place: (1) horse riding provided the means to herd large enough numbers of animals for a family to survive independent of grain cultivation, and to move the herd frequently enough to prevent overgrazing on the fragile steppe vegetation; (2) milk and preserved forms of milk (acid coagulated and acid-heat coagulated cheeses, ghee) from ruminants (cattle, sheep, and goats) and koumis from horses provided vital supplements to the meat-based diet of the nomadic life; (3) the wagon provided a means to transport the family, shelter, and necessities that enabled daily life to follow behind the migrating herd in a new form of mobile pastoralism.

Over the next thousand years mobile pastoralism, organized around meat, milk, and milk products, spread east across the fragile drying Pontic-Caspian steppe, infusing into the subsistence strategy of mixed agricultural culture of the Siberian Altai a new element of mobile pastoral herding that obviated the need for sedentary grain cultivation. To the east of the Altai, the Paleolithic hunter-forager peoples of Mongolia soon began to assimilate elements of mobile pastoralism from their Altai neighbors through cultural diffusion as they endeavored to adapt to growing climatic stress. Specifically, by the third millennium BC the Mongolian climate began to shift to a cooler and substantially drier norm. In response to declining rainfall, forests gradually retreated northward, leaving behind a vast new steppe that rendered the long-standing Paleolithic way of life based on hunting unsustainable in Mongolia. The assimilation of knowledge and practices of pastoral herding and dairying that had been crafted and refined on the western steppe now ushered in a new era of nomadic herding and dairying to Mongolia.

By the early centuries of the second millennium BC, a striking transformation in Mongolian life had replaced the former hunter-forager subsistence strategy. Now Mongolian life was characterized by livestock herding, caravans of yak loaded with household possessions, horseback riding, and wheeled wagons. Thereafter, as climatic drying intensified and the carrying capacity for grazing livestock on the steppe declined, this early relatively settled form of pastoralism gave way to a more nomadic way of life that has come to characterize traditional Mongolian life on the steppe ever since, even down to the present.

By the end of the second millennium BC, nomadic mobile pastoral dairying was well established on the Eurasian steppe , extending from west of Kazakhstan all the way to Mongolia and, indeed, had even spread through population migrations southward to the dizzying heights of Tibet, to the exceedingly dry Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang region of Northwest China, and through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Ganges River Valley of northern India, where migrating steppe pastoralists established the Hindu culture. From there, dairying, cheese and butteroil technology was carried east to China, Korea and Japan by Buddhist monks in the first millennium BC. In contrast to India, which wholeheartedly assimilated dairy into regional food culture, China, Korea and Japan merely tolerated dairy for its Buddhist medicinal qualities (especially colostrum) and its importance in Buddhist religious rites. The ever-present spiritual connections that accompanied the migrations of milk, cheese and butter technology hither and yon will be the topic of future posts. Suffice it to say that broad acceptance of dairy throughout food cultures east of India was largely absent until the 20th century.

At this point, I think it is time to step back and consider “at 40,000 feet” what all of this means for today. A strong argument can be made that over the past 10,000 years, dairying and cheesemaking (co-produced with butteroil) have enabled human communities to co-evolve, cope with, and ultimately thrive, in some of the most challenging environments on the planet.

The Eurasian steppe offers a striking example of this. The story of the development of nomadic dairying and cheesemaking on the western steppe, and its diffusion eastwards to Mongolia offers a powerful lens through which to consider the singular role that dairy has played in the resiliency of human communities to adapt to climate change over thousands of years. We now know that many communities who were living at the forest-steppe interface, some 6000 years ago, came under intense survival pressure as climate shifted repeatedly becoming much colder for a time, and then much drier. As outlined above, the subsistence strategies of many of these communities became untenable, and harnessing the milk and meat producing capacity of their grazing animals through nomadic herding provided these stressed communities with a way to cope with the crisis.

Now, an amazing aspect of the story is that the steppe grasslands were, and still are, remarkably fragile, therefore, nomadic herders had to develop intricate systems of grazing and steppe management to preserve the productive capacity of their surrounding environment. Incredibly enough, thousands of years later, nomadic herding and dairying continues to this day on the fragile Mongolian steppe. Thus, I would argue that there is potentially much to learn from the past about how we can build future systems of resiliency that will enable humanity to adapt to climate change in the future.

Let consider a specific example. When it comes to mitigating the forces that are fueling climate change today, our grasslands are one of our greatest assets globally for sequestering carbon dioxide and for providing resiliency in the face of weather pattern changes and deforestation. Vast spaces across the planet, not just the Eurasian steppe, are occupied by grasslands and dry rangelands, many of which have been centers of traditional nomadic and semi-nomadic dairying for millennia. These are some of the most fragile environments on the planet, and yet they serve as one of the world’s most important carbon dioxide sinks. It is estimated that 20% of global soil carbon stocks are sequestered by grasslands, many of which are highly fragile and vulnerable to desertification. When desertification occurs, that sequestered carbon in released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The bottom line is that grasslands/rangelands sequester carbon, and some of the most fragile rangelands have been grazed sustainably, and have supported traditional communities, for thousands of years.

We are just beginning to elucidate the science behind the complex synergy that exists between grassland health, the animals that graze the grass, and the resulting selective pressures that optimize healthy grass species. As the science has progressed, it has become increasingly evident that the influence of dairying on climate change and sustainability is very complex. It’s not just about methane emissions from grazing animals, or phosphorus runoff into surface water, as important as those issues are, because grazing animals (including dairy animals) also represent powerful tools to enhance grassland health, which in turn, can lead to multiple environmental benefits related to climate change mitigation, improved water quality, less soil erosion, and overall enhanced sustainability.

For example, when grazing practices are optimized on fragile rangelands, grassland health is improved, and this, in turn, results in higher nutritional quality of the grass. Higher quality grass, in turn, results in lower emissions of methane from the grazing dairy animals. At the same time, healthy grasslands have a greater capacity to sequester carbon emissions by the grazing dairy animals. Healthy grasslands also resist erosion, and prevent nutrient runoff, and protect surface water quality, and all of this is possible while concurrently allowing those same dairy animals to produce the richest foodstuff known to humanity, milk, from otherwise useless grass.

The productive capacity of the globe’s natural grasslands, in turn, not only sequesters an enormous reservoir of carbon but also helps to feed some of the poorest, most marginalized people on the planet, nearly a billion of them, who depend on grassland herding and dairying! This is a win-win story about resiliency, environmental sustainability and just plain compassion for traditional herders and grazers. Traditional grazing communities in places like Mongolia, arguably, have served as living examples of sustainability for millennia.  Frankly, we ought to be thinking about systems of carbon credits to reward nomadic herders who effectively serve as custodians of our fragile rangelands.

The point I am trying to make, is that cheese history offers a unique lens through which to distill down the essentials of this very complex story, in an accessible format that will enable the next generation to grasp the remarkable role that dairy has played in the environmental sustainability and resiliency of human communities to climate change over thousands of years. Furthermore, it provides a platform to also talk about the future of dairying to potentially contribute to greenhouse gas reduction and a more sustainable future. This is a story that today’s youth needs to hear, because it embodies a real moral imperative! There is a reason why milk, cheese and butter, and the animals that make them possible, have been viewed by human communities as sacred for millennia. In other words, reverence for milk, and stewardship of the animals that produce milk, not ugly animal abuse that some advocacy groups would lead one to believe, have been recurring themes of dairy over the last 10,000 years, and this spiritual reverence for milk and dairy animals can be witnessed in the many regions of the world today where traditional dairying is still practiced.