A landmark study is the first major effort to quantify how lactose tolerance developed
The dawn of dairy farming in Europe occurred thousands of years before most people evolved the ability to drink milk as adults without becoming ill. Now researchers think they know why: lactose tolerance was beneficial enough to influence evolution only during occasional episodes of famine and disease, explaining why it took thousands of years for the trait to become widespread1.
Natural selection The ability to digest milk evolved independently in ancient populations around the world. Researchers have mapped the trait to gene variants that instruct cells to produce high levels of lactase. The variant that most people of European ancestry carry is one of the strongest examples of natural selection on the human genome.
To determine the probable forces behind Europeans’ ability to digest milk, a team led by Evershed and two Bristol colleagues, chemist Mélanie Roffet-Salque and epidemiologist George Davey Smith, together with Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, collated archaeological and genomic data.
This suggests that, for most lactose-intolerant people, the costs of drinking milk aren’t that high today, Thomas says — and probably weren’t in ancient times, either. “If you’re healthy, you get a bit of diarrhoea, you get cramps, you fart a lot. It’s unpleasant, but you’re not going to die.”
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