When was Milking Started?

When was Milking Started?
For million of years breast milk has been the first beverage. Replacement with animal milk carried tremendous implications and potential nutritional advantages.

The first irrefutable evidence for milking domesticated livestock, and by implication, human use of milk and the manufacture of dairy products, dates to approx 4000 BC and is based on Stone Age art produced by the central Sahara region of Africa.

By 1500 BC, milk use was widely distributed. It has been described in the Charaka Samhita:

“Cow milk has been properties: sweet, cold, soft, fatty, viscous, smooth, slim, heavy, dull, and clear. Buffalo milk is heavier and colder than that from cow: useful to cure sleeplessness and excessive digestive power.

Cow milk is rough, hot, slightly saline, light and prescribed for hardness in the bowels, works against worms.... Milk from one hooved animals (donkey, horse) is hot, slightly, sour, saline, light promotes strength, stability alleviates vata in extremities. Goat milk is astringent...”

Anthologists, geographers and physicians have written on the physiologic and dietary implications of humans using animal milks an use or nonuse of flavored particular societies.

With our ability of feed grass to livestock and the use the milk in its raw form or as fermented cheese, humans expanded into new areas of habitation and increased population density.

The majority of other human population – following the standard mammalian pattern – lose the ability to maintain lactase production and therefore, cannot digest fresh animal milks easily, a pattern evidenced by most Asian, West Africans, Sothern European Mediterranean and most Central and South Americans.

However, some human populations now maintain lactase production throughout their lives, a physiologic characteristic that kinks peoples and cultures as diverse as east African cattle pastoralists (e.g., the Masai, Suk an Turkama) with northern European Scandinavian.
When was Milking Started?