Food & agriculture · c. 7,000 BCE

Dairying

Milk fats in Anatolian pots show herders drinking and processing milk 9,000 years ago.

Residues in pottery from northwest Anatolia prove milk processing by about 7000 BCE. Cheese and yogurt cut lactose so adults could digest it, and dairying later drove the spread of the lactase persistence gene in Europe.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Cattle 8000 BCE
Pottery 18k BCE

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

World population over a million years Latest: 6.27k million people (2000) Source: DeLong 1998, table 'Total World Population' (Kremer series); Kremer 1993, Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990, QJE 108(3)

Height of men by birth year, UK Latest: 177 cm (1980) Source: Our World in Data