If you can't process milk sugar, it wads up in your colon.
Traces of milk fat left on ancient pottery shows that people drank milk long before they could digest lactose.At the end of the last Ice Age, 11,700 years ago, only babies would have been able to digest lactose, one of the key sugars in milk. Being able to do so into adulthood is a new development in our evolution.
The new story of milk-drinking unfolds through three lines of evidence. The first is a map of nearly 13,000 ancient pottery fragments collected from Portugal to Turkey to Finland. Although the contents of the pots were long dried up, animal fats leave distinctive residues—which allows researchers, 9,000 years later, to tell if they held milk.
But if milk goes down so easily, that leaves another mystery: Why would ancient Europeans so quickly have developed lactose tolerance, if they didn’t need it?
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