Warrior Skeletons Reveal Bronze Age Europeans Couldn’t Drink Milk
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn't drink milk:
About 3000 years ago, thousands of warriors fought on the banks of the Tollense river in northern Germany. They wielded weapons of wood, stone, and bronze to deadly effect: Over the past decade, archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of hundreds of people buried in marshy soil. It's one of the largest prehistoric conflicts ever discovered.
Now, genetic testing of the skeletons reveals the homelands of the warriors-and unearths a shocker about early European diets: These soldiers couldn't digest fresh milk.
Searching for more insight into the battle, researchers sequenced the DNA of 14 of the skeletons. They discovered the warriors all hailed from central Europe-what is today Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, their genetic similarity offers little insight into why they fought.
"We were hoping to find two different groups of people with different ethnic backgrounds, but no," says study co-author Joachim Burger, a geneticist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. "It's disappointingly boring."
However, two of the 14 skeletons were women, suggesting a more complex scene than archaeologists had reconstructed.
The study, published today in the journal Cell Biology, turned up a different surprise, too. None of the warriors had the genetic mutation that allows adults to digest milk, an ability known as lactase persistence that's common in many Europeans.
Journal Reference:
Joachim Burger. Low Prevalence of Lactase Persistence in Bronze Age Europe Indicates Ongoing Strong Selection over the Last 3,000 Years, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.033)
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