Sometimes some questions come to our minds and we can never find the answers. For example, who first thought of diving into the bees’ hives to get their honey? Or who was the first to dare the brave act of riding on horses?
In this article, we will seek to answer one of these questions: Who milked the first cow? Who discovered that the first animal milk was drinkable? How did he go back and explain to his people what he had done after squeezing the animal’s udder and pouring the milk into a bucket? Let’s take a closer look at this case.
When was the first milk expressed?
To tell about this event, we first need to talk a little bit about archeology. The first milking process was probably the invention of the farmers. It was unlikely that a hunter-gatherer would get close enough to a large wild cow that was overly protective of her suckling calf. For this reason, it is believed that it was the farmers who discovered it, since the first milking can only take place after sedentary life.
The first milked milk in history was determined by analyzing the lipid residues of milk fats in potsherds that existed about 8,000 years ago. The strongest evidence of first milking was found in cattle-rich northwestern Anatolian lands, leading leading researchers to think that cattle were probably the first milked animals.
Sheep may have been milked, of course, but they are less physiologically adapted than cows to be abundant milk suppliers. As people today are most familiar with cow’s milk in the dairy industry, we will mainly focus on cattle in this article. So what was going through the minds of the first people who decided to milk their animals?
What was going through the mind of the one who milked the first cow?
First, humans in early human societies closely studied mammals and their offspring. The relationship between a mammal’s mammary glands and its offspring would not have come as a surprise to early farmers, as humans also fed their young. Of course, it was known what came out of the human breast.
Later, these early farmers began looking through another window at the early herd of domesticated cattle, sheep or goats, whose meat they normally kept for food. As the animals’ birth season approached, the farmer moved the pregnant females from the large pasture to a smaller farm area and placed them closer to the human population. This way both mothers and their newborn babies will be better protected from predators and the farmer can assist with difficult births.
A newborn calf starts suckling its mother almost immediately. While the calf was suckling and the cow was suckling, the farmer also began to examine. He linked people’s suckling of their children with animals’ feeding of their young. Realizing that the cow’s udder was larger than a human’s, he realized that it was drinkable, and tried to squeeze the udder into a container. The hardest part here was getting close enough to the animal and gaining the cow’s confidence in herself.
Of course, we could have put a ‘probably’ phrase at the beginning of everything we explained and tried to explain under this subheading, but this would disrupt the flow a bit. Assume so, though, because we can never really know 100% exactly how people thought to express milk for the first time. We can only base ourselves on the ‘educated guesses’ of such historians and archaeologists.
In fact, there were some evolutionary and technological hurdles that humans and cattle had to overcome before dairy products became widely and extensively used by human societies; these were early limitations of the milk let-down reflex in cattle and, of course, lactose intolerance in humans. Later, we will talk about when people thought to purify milk by boiling it.
To summarize:
We can say that those who thought to milk the first milk were the first farmers in settled life (again, putting ‘high probability’ in front of them). They made an analogy by seeing people breastfeed, and they thought they could extract the milk from a larger breast to support their people. Thus, the first milk was expressed. What are you thinking? Please do not forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments.
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