A new study has pieced together a remarkable story that needs to be shared. It all began in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of the Ukraine and southern Russia between 7000 and 5000 years ago. Thankfully, the prehistoric people under study did not use tooth brushes, and the dental calculus on their teeth is a vital source for reconstructing their diet.
Samples taken from the calculus of many people living then have been subjected to analysis to see if they contain dairy peptides. Seven thousand years ago, they were keen on the abundant fish that swarmed in the Volga River. But two millennia later, they were drinking a lot of milk, not to mention cheese and yoghurt. You might imagine that they kept dairy cows, but the peptides rather show that they were milking horses.
This becomes even more interesting when we turn to ancient DNA. This is a virtually infallible way of tracking migrations if only it survives in human bones. Thankfully, the stone hard petrous bone in the ear does retain DNA, and we now know that the milk drinkers, who are known as the Yamnaya, expanded dramatically from their steppe homeland. To the east, they took their herds and genes to the Altai in Siberia. To the west, they came into Europe, as did the Huns centuries later, reaching as far as the Baltic states. And they also brought with them their language, early Indo-European.
The worldwide spread of Indo-European languages has for long been debated by archaeologists and now we can pin it on the horses that supplied milk in the arid steppe lands and hauled the wagons of those intrepid migrants.
