What is the best of food?
Milk, for many a change comes out of it; butter and cheese are made of it, and it will feed a little child and an old man.
What is the worst of food?
Lean flesh. J.F. Campbell, West Highland Tales, III, 48.
The logic of this chapter is to some extent reversed. We know that dairying was of fundamental importance to the population of Scotland: was it another of their mesolithic traits? The evidence put forward here is only part of the whole; the whole including detailed counter-arguments to recent genetic proposals will be presented in a future publication.
The very early control of animals such as reindeer and aurochs in Western Europe has been suggested by a variety of writers. The primary incentive may have been to slaughter young males but an incidental benefit was that it allowed the herders to milk the females. Campbell of Islay saw reindeer being milked by Lapps in a scene that could well be unchanged from the Palaeolithic.1
‘First, each of the girls took a coil of rope from about her neck and in a twinkling it was pitched over the horns of a hind. The noose was then slipped round the neck and a couple of turns of rope round the nose, and then the wild milkmaid set her foot on the halter and proceeded to milk the hind, into a round birch bowl with a handle. Sometimes she sat, at others she leant her head on the deer’s dark side, and knelt beside her. … The blear-eyed one, and the boy, and our party, went into the cota and dined on cold roast reiper and reindeer milk. … It was sweet and delicious, like thick cream.’
The milking routine at Gairloch towards the middle of the nineteenth century had an equally timeless quality.2 The estate then maintained a herd of sixty cows and their calves. The morning milking began at 6 am and took three hours to complete, and the whole performance was repeated in the evening. The milkmaids carried pails, three-legged stools and hobbles or buarach made of strong hair rope with a loop which fastened over a large wooden button made of rowan wood (to keep away the fairies). The calves had been penned separately overnight but were now released, one by one, as their mothers were being milked, so that the milkmaid on one side shared the milk with the calf on the other. The dairy equipment consisted of many flat, shallow, wooden dishes and wooden churns, casks and kegs, all of which had to be sterilised every day to keep the milk sweet. This was done by lighting a huge peat fire, heating hundreds of selected beach-stones or dornagan, the size of a fist, until they were red hot, and dropping them into the vessels. Three or four hot stones were enough to make the water boil immediately. Osgood does not say how many milkmaids were employed but it was clearly a full-time job for a large number of women, particularly when the preparation of butter and cheese are included.
‘Since the right to keep or graze a cow applied to almost every class in the pre-enclosure farming communities, the milk products, fresh or preserved in some way, were the main defence against hunger. The cow was the form of social security of the period, as long as it was in milk.’3 Certain parts of Scotland produced so much cheese that it was used as a form of currency, paid in lieu of rent or instead of military service. ‘Both cheese and butter formed part of the teinds or tithes that had to be paid to the Church. The quantity of cheese paid as part of secular rents was such a regular feature, that the word kain, a payment in kind for rent, came to mean a certain quantity of cheese, about 60 cwt., in Argyll, Ayrshire, Dunbartonshire, and Galloway, and the dairyman who paid his rent in cheese was a kainer.’4 At the end of the day, of course, all this huge quantity of cheese was eaten, often lavishly spread with butter to make it more palatable.
If the Gaels are reliable guides, Adam was a hunter and Eve was a milk-maid. As place-name in some places tell us, the hill pastures were divided between deer-hunters and cattle-herders, between deer forest and shealing ground, thus ensuring a supply of venison in the winter and dairy products in the summer. The deer and the cattle were free to follow their seasonal migrations without undue disturbance. Before complete domestication the hills may still have had areas normally used by cattle and others used by deer. The transition between the two seasons, on 1 May and 1 November, Beltane and Samhain, was marked by bonfires and corresponds to what we know of transhumance in Perthshire and elsewhere but it may originally have marked the natural seasonal migration of wild cattle. 1 November in recent times marked the start of the winter hunting and by then the tenants and their beasts had to have left the hills, but it may mark a natural migration, the end of the milking season, when the beasts were left to their own devices for the winter.
This was a voluntary arrangement, willingly adhered to but in the eighteenth century there are complaints about tenants’ cattle invading the deer-forests of Atholl. ‘The inference must be that in the eighteenth century shealings were considered more important than deer.’5 The 4th Duke of Atholl noted with disapproval that in 1774 ‘even what was denominated Forest was studded with such Sheals, and grasing of the deer and numbers quite reduced’6 The change of emphasis, leading to this neglect of the deer population, may be related to the fact that after the Disarming Act of 1746 the tenants had been unable to hunt deer, and were forced to concentrate on cattle. (They were no doubt feeding commercial animals for resale.) The Duke restricted his tenants to defined areas which lay outwith the deer forests, which appears to have been the normal arrangement, but it does not appear this reform worked since in less than a generation the higher farms of Atholl, those most dependent on shealings, had been abandoned.
The lexical evidence for milking
Despite its invisibility to archaeology, evidence for prehistoric dairying can be deduced from both linguistic and genetic sources. The linguistic argument depends on a simple principle of which can be deduced very easily by comparing American English and British English. Their names for material items are either the same in both languages, or divergent. Items with the same name in both languages, such as door, horse, house, and window, can be traced back to the language used in both countries before America was settled. Settlers took these convergent words with them. But almost all the names of items added to both cultures after this point have been coined separately and are now divergent. There are hundreds of examples: flashlight v. torch, trunk v. boot of a car, sidewalk v. pavement, railroad v. railway, and so on. The rule is that convergent words are common and early while divergent words are localised and later.
When we look at names for the cow we find strong convergence. All the mainstream languages of Western Europe call a cow by its Q name cow, or its P version bo. We can deduce that both the name and the animal belong to the earliest spread of European culture and language in the Palaeolithic. The only other possibility is that the cow arrived as an entirely new animal in the Neolithic or Bronze Age, many thousands of years after permanent settlement, and that it came with its name attached. The table below shows that Neolithic novelties have widely divergent names: imported, certainly but named locally. The common name for the cow confirms that people were familiar with the wild cow or aurochs throughout Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic and that this was its Palaeolithic name. Moreover it is now confirmed that the wild aurochs is the generic ancestor of the domesticated cow. The two are close enough to interbreed.7 There was no new beginning in the Neolithic. As far back as it is possible to go, a cow was a cow. Genetically and lexically, there has always been a cow in Europe (at least from 250,000 BP) and it was always the same animal.
The concept of convergence (old common inheritance) and divergence (later acquired features) holds true in the names of other animals. Wild pigs and red deer were also native to the whole of Palaeolithic Europe, but sheep, goats, and horses came into Europe in the Neolithic or Bronze Age as domesticates.8 Since, like cows, pigs and deer were familiar to the earliest occupants of Europe their European names also should be convergent and a little investigation shows widely convergent words cognate with E. porker and deer - the latter sometimes a generic 'animal' name, probably reflecting the long dependence on reindeer. As for divergence, European names for the later sheep, goat and domestic pig should vary locally, since they arrived after permanent settlement in the mesolithic and would be named locally as and when a name was needed. As the table below shows, this is again is what we find. Thus we can propose that a convergent name, such as cow, identifies an animal known to man already in Palaeolithic Europe, and that divergent or localised names are used for novel animals which arrived more recently and were named locally by piecemeal invention. The only caveat is that the shared lexicon will include terms appropriate to milking reindeer as well as cattle. They do not cover butter or cheese which suggests that the initial domestication involved reindeer. We may therefore suppose that the cow had a similar form and function already in the Palaeolithic.
Milking and other terms in Western Europe
C: convergence. D: divergence. Italics: local divergence.
| English | Dutch | German | Danish | Gaelic | French | |
| ox | os | ochse | okse | (ur)uisg | boeuf | C |
| cow | koe | kuh | kue | bo | vache | C |
| calf | kalv | kalb | kalv | laogh | veau | C |
| milk | melk | milch | mælk | bliochd | lait | C |
| butter | boter | butter | smør | ìm | buerre | C |
| cheese | kaas | käse | ost | càis | fromage | C |
| cream | room | rahm | fløde | cé | crème | C |
| porker, boar | varke | ferkel | orne | uircean, orc | porc | C |
| pig, swine | big ‘piglet’ | schwein | gris, svin | muc | cochon | D |
| sheep | schaap | schaf | faar | aodh | mouton | D |
| horse | pfaard | pferd | hest | each | cheval | D |
| barley | gerst | gerste | byg | eorna | orge | D |
| wheat | tarwe | weizen | hvete | cruitneachd | blé | D |
This demonstrates very clearly that there was no 'Neolithic Revolution'. Novel animals and crops were named piecemeal in different countries (D). But names for cattle, milk and most dairy products are strongly convergent throughout most of Western Europe (C). We find cow, bo, boeuf, vache, and veau; milk and bliochd, lait (Lat. lac); butter and beurre. These words come from the most recent common level of culture. We can also deduce from the table that the Gaels and the Danes came to dairying relatively late and evolved their terms for butter and cheese independently (milk is a universal constant). This can no doubt be explained by a late switch from milking reindeer to milking cows. The convergence of words for milk, butter and cheese over much of Western Europe points to domestication and dairying in the Palaeolithic, before permanent settlement in the Mesolithic. Archaeology cannot yet recognise milk, butter or cheese, as far as I know, and would find it difficult to identify a nomad camp abandoned a week earlier, but it can at least confirm that wild cattle lived over most of Europe long before the earliest settlers and that the aurochs cow is one of the most powerful of the beasts in the cave-paintings.
Dairying among the Gaels
The Scottish Highlanders, whose culture and language are a reliable touchstone for archaic survival, were devoted to milk. From the pattern of land-use in Highland Scotland the population appear to have been pastoral farmers before they came into Scotland in the Mesolithic. As noted elsewhere, they traditionally divided their upland pastures into deer forest and summer pasture for cattle. Men hunted over the winter while women milked over the summer, and the combination of summer milk, cheese and butter with winter venison was a fruitful one. The legends of the uruisg or brownie show that their cows were bred to wild aurochs bulls, an animal remembered as a rough but friendly creature, half-human, half-animal, who lurked around the winter homesteads and did good deeds, no doubt attracted by the tame house cows. Milkmaids tamed him with libations of milk.
Domestication
Domestication is increasingly seen to have been a more complex process than was once thought. One thing is clear: we only domesticate species which we are already exploiting. Up to and including farmed salmon and oysters, domestication does not mark a new start but has been a means of securing a supply of some valuable food resource. We can therefore conclude that milk was a vital food resource long before there are any signs that milk-animals have been domesticated. This argument covers reindeer, cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and horses in different places at different times. The considerable effort required to maintain a breeding herd through dry summers and cold winters reflects the importance of the end-product: a secure supply of fresh milk. Many milking cultures are completely focused on the welfare of their herds. This high-risk experiment could never have been successful without considerable previous experience of handling such animals in a wild or semi-wild state: indeed, current terminology is no longer adequate to define the exploitation of what must, for thousands of years, have remained wild animals, habituated to people but not controlled by them.
The impulsion in every case was our dependence on the wild herds as a source of milk. The specific reasons which prompted our ancestors to tame the aurochs, not once but on several different occasions, will be discussed below but boil down to the convenience of having tame house-cow.
Central to the process of domestication is the question of function. The main function of a herd of domestic cows is to produce milk. Meat and hides are useful by-products but not the main function of the cow; for meat and hides people hunted red deer. In Scotland, which is reliably archaic, only the cows were tamed and beef was seldom eaten. The new improved Neolithic cow sooner or later replaced the wild cow all over Europe, either by direct domestication of the wild stock or by interbreeding with an imported replacement. There is evidence for long-distance trade in domesticated cattle between India and East Africa in prehistory. The purpose of the upgrade was not to change the species but to maintain it. The function of the new cow was exactly the same as the function of the old cow. Our ancestors upgraded because they were dependent on a regular supply of fresh milk.
The lactase argument
In addition to the lexical argument and the need to review the priorities of domestication, there is a further argument for early milking in Palaeolithic Europe: the distribution of the lactase enzyme in different populations. The reference given is an old one but it states the basic facts against which any new theories must be measured.9 Objective argument has recently been derailed by the persistent application of the Indo-European fallacy to modern populations and I will discuss these recent arguments in due course (but not here). If we stick to facts, the lactase argument for early milking cannot be divorced from the lexical evidence for early milking presented above. Nothing can change the fact that a whole series of convergent 'milking' words were used in Europe before settlement, brought into every part by the spread of milkers and milk-animals in the Palaeolithic. With this milk-using population came the lactase gene which allowed them to use milk. The argument is very simple.
Anyone who produces the lactase enzyme can digest lactose, a sugar found in fresh milk. This enzyme is normally produced only by young children, but the majority of Europeans share a peculiar ability to digest fresh milk as adults. It is no surprise to find that the current distribution of this enzyme matches very closely the spread of milk animals. The Turks are not lactose-tolerant but have borrowed milking from their neighbours. They have learned to ferment milk, a process which retains the food value and convenience of milk but reduces the lactose to lactic acid. The Chinese do not use milk at all, because the Chinese do not produce the lactase enzyme after the age of three or four (the normal human pattern). After that age they find fresh milk, butter and cheese increasingly repellent. Their only animals are water buffalo, bred for traction, and domestic dogs and pigs. In the world as a whole the pastoral cattle, sheep and goats so familiar to Europeans are limited to areas settled by people who are persistent lactase producers and able to digest fresh milk as adults.
How did this genetic quirk spread through the European population? The possibilities are all variations on a single theme: positive selection for the lactase gene, which is to say, reduced survival prospects for adults who are unable to tolerate fresh milk. The most plausible scenario is that the ancestors of the bulk of the modern European population went through a bottleneck, or a series of bottlenecks, which favoured those who could digest fresh milk. Since the lactase gene is found in every part of Europe but not widely outside Europe this near-extermination event evidently took place very early in the settlement of Europe, or even in Asia among the population that finally settled in Europe. It was possible because there is a small percentage of lactase-producers in every population - 7 per cent even in China. In non-milking populations this ability has no value as lactase-producers are never exposed to fresh milk as adults. However this handful of lactase-producers would survive a famine where the only available food was milk. They might find milk disgusting but they would thrive on this abnormal diet while the majority of non-producers died out. Since this is an all-or-none selection, it would take only a few weeks or months to select for lactase. The death of most of the adult population would be followed (and evidently was followed) by the proliferation of a population selected for their ability to digest fresh milk as adults. There is no other plausible explanation of the homogenous distribution of the lactase gene in the European population.
As well as persistent lactase they needed one more thing: a persistent source of milk. Since the European population, particularly in the north, has remained notably adapted to fresh milk, European adults and children must have continued to use fresh milk as a staple food in every generation from the point where they entered Europe, perhaps from 50,000 BP onwards. At this point they were already culturally cut off from their neighbours, if any, who had other sources of food from hunting or fishing.
Since lactase production persisted in Europe, this abnormal diet also continued. We need not suppose that every adult drank fresh milk every day but it is clear that an ability to digest fresh milk as an adult gave the individual enormous advantages. A reliance on milk continued and still continues. In medieval Scotland most of the rural population - women, children, old men and unemployed hunters - appear to have lived through the summer on milk and its by-products. An over-reliance on dairy products produces iron-deficiency anaemia, and this was recognised in three children aged from 5 to 10 who died c. 3300 BC and were buried in a single grave in the south of England, together with a woman aged about 30 who was the mother of the youngest child. They had had a high-protein diet which was probably based on milk as the adult had almost perfect teeth and the presence of iron-deficiency anaemia suggested an absence of meat.10 Europeans do not often realise that their milk-culture is a peculiar aberration in global terms but this is so. They claim that milk is the perfect food but fresh milk has no place in the diet of most Africans or Asians. (One wonders if Oxfam has sufficiently studied this question.) Nor, as the Indo-European school must argue, has later exposure to milk lead anywhere in the world to the spread of the lactase gene: not even in Turkey. The geographical spread of this major variation in the world's digestive capacities places milking in the Palaeolithic, in Asia, among those who went on to settle Europe.
The lactase story suggests that pastoral activities, as well as hunting, should show up in early European place-names and language. In practice pastoral place-names are difficult to recognise in Scotland, no doubt because rounding-up cattle to milk them used the same techniques and the same terminology as rounding up deer to kill them. We can recognise hunting terms with some confidence in the remoter parts of Highland Scotland, since large tracts of upland were always deer forest, being too high and too wild for any other use. However townships or joint farms are pastoral units and use a variety of topographical terms. That said, an early Scottish word for a pastoral unit is a dabhach, 'place of horned cattle'. Watson noted that a davach is 'a large tub with two handles' in Ireland but in Scotland 'a large measure of land … reckoned to support so many head of stock’.11 The Irish tub and the Scottish measure of land are evidently two distinct words. Kenneth Jackson's view (in his notes on the Book of Deer) of the davach as an arable unit is based on a misreading of Pennant. Pennant in his Tour of Scotland in 1772 said that there were things called davochs in Wester Ross but that it was impossible that they could be arable units since there was no arable land there to speak of, only tiny patches among the rocks. He noted that a half-davach in Loch Broom supported sixty cows and their followers and was managed by eight men, eight women and an overseer. This seems conclusive. The best-preserved davachs are those which make up the parish of Strathavon in Banffshire, which has a good claim to be the wildest and wettest settlement land in Europe. But the individual names of the townships are still topographical names coined by hunters in the days when Strathavon was still beyond the bounds of settlement.
Another exception are the airidh-ruaidh names used for summer pasture in Perthshire12 They appear to be early as most shielings in this area are known only by the general topographical names coined by hunters. These airidh-ruaidh names may relate to an event in the Bronze Age or Iron Age, when modern cattle were introduced and carefully herded to keep them safe. To a similar reorganisation we can perhaps attribute the building of the crannogs (c.600 BC) and the so-far undated circular homestead or cattle pens of northern Perthshire.
We must not lose sight of another possibility, that any search for early settlement must take account of the progressive loss, over the millenia, of a vast area of coastal grazing around what are now the Hebrides. Inland deer forests must have been grossly disturbed as displaced families and their herds, wild or tame, retreated inland to higher ground. Inland areas would also become more attractive to permanent settlement as sea-levels rose and the climate improved. A need to accommodate more people may explain the marginal inland settlements like Strathavon which consist of a string of low-lying transhumance townships with their winter homesteads on a very narrow strip of low land along a rocky burn, summer grazing or shealings within the deer forest at a short distance (five kilometres on average), and a huge peripheral area of hunting forest. The forest was no doubt exploited from the Mesolithic onwards by bands of organised hunters but as permanent settlements such inland townships, high, wet and stony, may have been relatively short-lived.
Appendix: Incidence of Lactase Persistence
This shows very clearly the link between geography and lactase persistence. The very high Australian-European figure relates to the very high proportion of Scots-Irish settlers in Australia.
China 1-7%
Japan 10%
Bantu Africans 11%
Inner Mongolians 12%
Australian Aborigines 15%
Afro-Caribbeans living in Britain 19%
Lebanese 22%
Kazakhs (Xinjiang) 23%
Mexicans (rural population) 26%
Egypt 27%
Italy 28%: also Italy (north) 48%, Italy (centre) 81%, Italy (south) 59%?
Southern France 35%
Saami I (in Russia and Finland) 40%
Balkan 45%
Greece 47%
Indians living in Britain 49%
France (average) 50%
Spain 50%
American-Africans 55%
Central Asians 60%
Southeast Asians 62%
Poland 63%
Eskimos (Alaska) 64%
Portuguese 65%
Bedouin 75%
Saami II 75%
Fulani 77%
India 80%
Tutsi 80%
American Asians 80%
Finland 82%
Northern France 83%
Germany 85%
Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians) 85%
Austria 87%
European average 90%
Swiss 90%
Denmark 95%
England 95%
Europeans living in Australia 96%
Denmark 97%
Sweden 98%
Ireland 98%
Netherlands 99%13
