Stefan:
>There remains the question
>if humans milked small animals like goats and sheep. Well, containers
>like buckets or pots were invented by humans several thousand years ago.
>That leaves not much time for genetical adaptation.
>And then remember that science says we lose the enzyme to digest milk
>in our very youth. Therefore I think we adults can't even digest human
>milk properly.

As always comes up on the paleolist, one of the major themes in much of
human genetic adaptation is neotony--the preservation of infantile traits
past infancy and into child and adulthood. Evolution didn't need to
"invent" the ability to digest milk; natural selection only needed to
_retain_ it if useful (as it apparently was in many caucasion bloodlines).
Not exactly a genetic miracle.

>I see the point. OTOH harvesting honey is a common behavior watched in
>nature (like stealing eggs) while milking other mammals has never been
>seen. It needed the manipulating human mind to invent this.

A manipulating human mind was responsible for (I'd bet) nearly every
variety of food item you've eaten in the last month--in breeding,
production, and/or distribution. Humans have exploited food resources
unavailable to lessor-mined mammals since we have been human. It is
conservative (I agree) to avoid dairy, but it is not radical to try them
for yourself and see how it goes for a person. Personal experience will
tell more than simplistic reasoning.

Why have "wild" mammals been seen to lap up milk if it is left out for
them? Orphaned sheep in some areas are regularly bottle-fed raw cow's milk
and they thrive. If you accept Pottinger's Cats stuff you'd agree that
adult cats did very well indeed on raw milk. None of this fits in with the
instincto ideas of the evils of interspecies milk consumption, regardless
of what is seen in nature.

>So there
>is no chance that humans inherited a genetical adaptation for milk of
>foreign species - we must have developed it ourself.

This is jumping a bit far. No chance? As one of the penultimate omnivores
on the planet, humans probably don't need a specific adaptation to every
species of milk. If it is raw, from healthy animals, tastes good--then it
probably is good, whether it comes from reindeer, goats, camels, or cows.
Further, many people do better on fermented dairy than fresh milk, which
according to your ideas is even  more denatured. But they do better on it.
Refering every agrument to "what is seen in pristine nature" is a very
conservative stance, but it may not be the most useful for most people.

>In summary I think our chances to have a genetical adaptation for non-
>human milk are very small. And they certainly do not justify the tons
>of milk and dairy that are consumed today.

The mountain Swiss studied by Weston Price would probably disagree.

Cheers,
Kirt

Secola  /\  Nieft
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