Its plausible to view milk as similar to honey. Our ancestors would occasionally have access to a honey comb, but it was never a staple food.
Interestingly, hunter-gatherers seem to regard it as more of a healthy substantial food to make hunters/warriors strong, rather than a dessert for children. In other words, they don't limit themselves to tiny amounts like we moderners do. By all accounts, they gorge on it when it's available (which I'm not advocating), which used to be for longer stretches than today, as there used to be more bee species, more forests and wildflower groves, and thus more honey-producing wild hives in the ancient past, and different wild bees reportedly specialize in different plants and thus produce honey at somewhat different times, expanding the season, not to mention the wild tree saps that were also available. It's still early in my process of learning about honey, though, so maybe I'll find something to contradict this some day, but so far not.
I would bet that when ice age hunters landed a large and lactating mammoth, that they would have most definitely consumed the milk seeping from the mammary tissue. Perhaps some groups of large game hunters would have had regular, although limited access to milk, from fresh kills.
That's an interesting point about the megafauna. Trying to make assessments without considering extinct megafauna doesn't make sense. Thanks for pointing that out. It could put some of the info I learned about Neanderthals from a Clive Gamble book into a possibly new perspective:
"Tooth eruption suggests that the bison were killed [by Neanderthals in Europe] at the end of summer and into the autumn. Eighty per cent of the individuals were adult females and calves, Adult males made up the remainder of the kill. The age profile is described as catastrophic with a high ratio of young individuals."
Clive Gamble The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe, 1999, p. 342
It would be interesting to know the truth behind the transition from hunters, to herdsman and dairy farmers. There must of been a transitory peiod between the huntsman and the emergence of the milkman.
Indeed it would, and there seems to be scant info or interest on this. There likely was indeed a transition period of some sort, rather than a sudden, dramatic shift to pastoralism.
Those peoples who do consume large amounts of milk, would ferment it to make it more digestible.
Yes, and this makes Haai's point about fermented milk in the bellies of young kills also quite intriguing.
Thanks again for your and Haai's and Van's posts on this topic, as they are quite rarely open-minded and interesting in the Paleosphere, with the usual stuff here and elsewhere being knee-jerk total condemnations of (and assumptions about zero or near-zero intakes without actually digging into it to find out, and complete lack of interest in) dairy of any sort in any era, from which we learn little or nothing. I haven't found any of your comments to be too dogmatically pro-dairy either. You've shown a healthy balance of skepticism.
BTW, I guess I deserve having to deal with some of the most extreme anti-dairy views, as I came to this forum in part because of the critical view on dairy that was stated in one of its articles (I had gotten tired of the posts of dairy advocates with chips on their shoulder, often fans of WAP, at another Paleo forum). So it seemed like it would be hospitable to dairy avoiders like I was at the time. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
This dairy topic got me intrigued about dairy again, so I tried a product I hadn't tried before--buttermilk from the jersey cows of a local family farm (the only buttermilk I had tried before was from Hood, many years ago). Even though it was pasteurized, the negative effects it had were surprisingly mild; barely perceptible. It had less of a negative effect than the pasteurized kefir I've tried, including from goats. I have no idea why. It makes me curious to try local raw milk.
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