Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding

Authors: Richard P. Evershed, Sebastian Payne, Andrew Sherratt, Mark S. Copley, Jennifer Coolidge, Duska Urem-Kotsu, Kostas Kotsakis, Mehmet Özdoğan, Aslý E. Özdoğan, Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, P.M.M.G. Akkermans, Doug Bailey, Radian-Romus Andeescu, Stuart Campbell, Shahina Farid, Ian Hodder, Nurcan Yalman, Mihriban Özbaşaran, Erhan Bıçakçı, Yosef Garfınkel, Thomas E. Levy, Margie M. Burton - Nature 2008 cited by 672

The use of the 'secondary' products of domesticated animals — the milk, wool and traction power that can be had without having to kill the animals — was an important advance in the development of farming. It's not clear, though, whether these products were exploited soon after animals were first farmed to be eaten, or whether as some experts believe, it took another few thousand years to emerge. Cattle, sheep and goats were farmed by the eighth millennium BC. Until now the first clear evidence for milk use was the late fifth millennium. Now an analysis of organic residues from more than 2,200 pottery vessels excavated from archaeological sites across the Near East and the Balkans, puts the first known use of milking back to the seventh millennium, with milking being of particular significance in what is now north-west Turkey where the environmental conditions were probably particularly favourable to cattle. The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats had already taken place in the Near East by the eighth millennium bc1,2,3. Although there would have been considerable economic and nutritional gains from using these animals for their milk and other products from living animals—that is, traction and wool—the first clear evidence for these appears much later, from the late fifth and fourth millennia bc4,5. Hence, the timing and region in which milking was first practised remain unknown. Organic residues preserved in archaeological pottery6,7 have provided direct evidence for the use of milk in the fourth millennium in Britain7,8,9, and in the sixth millennium in eastern Europe10, based on the δ13C values of the major fatty acids of milk fat6,7. Here we apply this approach to more than 2,200 pottery vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe dating from the fifth to the seventh millennia bc. We show that milk was in use by the seventh millennium; this is the earliest direct evidence to date. Milking was particularly important in northwestern Anatolia, pointing to regional differences linked with conditions more favourable to cattle compared to other regions, where sheep and goats were relatively common and milk use less important. The latter is supported by correlations between the fat type and animal bone evidence.