Dairy farming in the Sahara ? 7000 years ago

THE Sahara is hardly the land of milk and honey today, but it used to be very different.

Rock paintings showing farmers with cattle are found in the area, but putting precise dates on when they were painted is difficult. Now Julie Dunne of the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues have discovered milk residue on pottery shards from the Takarkori rock shelter in the Libyan Sahara, in layers known to be between 7200 and 5800 years old.

"The Sahara was quite a bit greener then," Dunne says. "There were lakes, grasslands and a wide variety of animal life ranging from cattle to crocodiles and hippos."

Storing milk in pots suggests it was being cured into cream or yogurt, which the lactose-intolerant prehistoric people would have been more likely to be able to digest, says Dunne.

The findings are evidence that milk played an important role in the diet of the prehistoric inhabitants of the region and confirm that dairy farming emerged in this area long before crop farming and sedentary living (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11186).

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