They say it was amazing that humans learned to drink cows' and goats' milk: "I think I'll pull on that animal's dangly...

They say it was amazing that humans learned to drink cows' and goats' milk: "I think I'll pull on that animal's dangly things and drink what comes out." What's even more amazing is that they discovered cheese. "Hey, I think I'll eat this solidified and congealed animal fluid that's been sitting here for days growing this blue mold."

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my guess is cheese came first.

Yes, though probably in actuality they happened around the same time, they would have transported the milk in bags made from the stomach and etc which coincidentally contain rennet, the enzyme responsible for making cheese. Early cheese was simply the milk shaken up in the stomach bag and then the curds and whey strained out.

I mean, we drink human milk as infants, and we would know pretty quickly that calves drink their mothers milk from those tits, it's not a huge jump to "maybe we can drink it too"

and cheese isn't that gross, we don't think it's gross because it's full of bacteria (in the case of blue cheese, also fungus) that don't harm us and out-compete bacteria and other microbes that would harm us. Most likely people just left milk out, because where else would you put it, and often it turns into curds and whey and our ancestors saw it and learned that it was edible and doesn't go bad very quickly so it became a good way to store the nutrients of milk over the course of months. remember that humans have had similar amounts of intelligence as modern humans for tens of thousands of years, and most of our advancement has been knowledge/culture/technology based since, not biology based.

Literate cultures are a significant advancement since it augments the poor capacity for memory

Jaynes thought this was the birth of self-consciousness itself.

Dude, you can say this about virtually every human achievement but I know what you mean.

Smoking is one that strikes me as odd. Who thought to wrap a plant in fibre and then inhale the smoke from burning it? How many plants did they go through?

>They say

Who exactly said that? It's bullshit.

>hasn't read Herodotus
pleb

> poor capacity for memory

Friendly reminder that the Illiad was recited from memory for hundreds of years before anyone wrote it down

And just like every human achievement that too was probably a step-wise process in which any step is probably rather mundane.

As a species though. That whole dark ages thing? Forgot a lot of important shit during that time period

Human memory dies (and tends not to travel very far, which is the real biggie), books are slightly more forever, printed books that circulate are forever.

>>the Illiad was recited from memory for hundreds of years before anyone wrote it down
You don't know that.
>The Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century BCE, so it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of authors who were also literate.

Regardless, the epic poets actually support my point since they needed repetition and formulae, a kind of proto-literacy, to actually remember the verses. Apart from these, oral tales are notorious for mutating beyond recognition in only a few generations.

People in the past weren´t as picky about eating stuff as we are now. Starvation was real, and then you eat pretty much anything that won´t kill you immediately.

The dark ages are a myth, dummy.

Yeah yeah I know. They were rather colorful what with all the dyes and shit.

If you think about it cheese, wine, beer, cured meats, pickles, salt/smoked fish and bread are wonders of human ingenuity - delicious, relatively sturdy foods that allowed us to travel and survive the winter. Genius level shit from the days before refrigeration.

>printed books that circulate are forever
And also stop the christians tracking down anyone who remembers the pre-christian days and setting fire to them.
Although I'm pretty sure they burned any book older than the bible at some point. The complete lack of any that haven't been dug up in modern times is pretty telling.

Fluid was stored in the stomach of animals a lot, even after they came with pottery, because it's light and won't break. There was some residual rennet and it caused the milk to curdle. Viola, non-fermented cheese.

Okay but hold on. Milk you see baby cows drinking so you must think its important for development or something. But think about the guy who decided to eat the first egg. Its way different than eating the animal byproducts.

other animals eat eggs
a lot of animals eat other animals' eggs

they were really hungry.

Its pretty obvious that early humans would have assumed that since humans produce milk, other mammals must produce it as well and that it would be drinkable.

I could see it being like nomads roaming the lands, making fires every night, then one day they can't find anything to make a fire, so they just start taking some plant matter, one thing leads to another, everyone is high/buzzed as fuck, they realize "the fuck this shit made us feel real good" so they try it again, then eventually they were like "we don't have to waste ALL this on a fire we can just make our own individual sticks of it".

I don't buy the whole "nomads accidentally make cheese" thing.
People had really specialized lives then and pooled all their resources together in a longhouse type system.
So like, certain people would have worked with dairy animals their entire lives and would be encouraged to get as much use of the animal as possible for bartering or developing worth. So they probably purposefully developed cheese.

Just my opinion.

>So like, certain people would have worked with dairy animals their entire lives and would be encouraged to get as much use of the animal as possible for bartering or developing worth. So they probably purposefully developed cheese.
How would it have been purposefully developed without prior knowledge of dairy fermentation and preservation?

It is more logical that it happened spontaneously, noticed to be of some value, then replicated and refined.

...

or they just had a famine, had one cow to pull a plow, no human-edible crop and no way to preserve beef. Then they saw the calf drink from its mother's teat.

>"I think I'll pull on that animal's dangly things and drink what comes out."
It was probably more of a combination of "Huh, humans make milk, so do cows and goats...I wonder if I can drink that?" and "Damn, those cows get pretty big drinking nothing but milk. Maybe I can survive off that and not have to kill my cow to live."

I've thought about so many times. Coffee is my prime candidate for "HOW".

>see bush, eat berry
> it's disgusting
> somehow roast berry
> it's somewhat less disgusting
> somehow grind up roasted berry and boil it with water
> it's fucking DIVINE

What other stuff haven't we applied ourselves enough to figuring out how to unlock godmode?

We have been and will be forever. Pretty much anyone who's ever cooked says "hey, what happens if I do this.."
It's usually a disaster, but sometimes you get shit like Caesar salad or Worcestershire Sauce.

cheese is just milk that went sort of bad. I want to know how someone figured out that you can pound grass seeds into flour and turn it into bread.

someone who figured their hurting teeth were done chewing.

>"I think I'll pull on that animal's dangly things and drink what comes out."

You can virtually guarantee that whoever discovered it was probably doing some insanely sick shit to that cow.

Fugu

How many people had to die before they found out what parts were the most likely to kill you? Who decided "Hey, how about just a little bite up by the front-end...?"

So the question is does anyone make cheese from human breast milk? We could be onto something here

there were probably certain seeds that they ate that turned to mush in their mouths
in order to make it more palatable, they precrushed the seeds beforehand, mixed it with water, and baked it so it wouldn't turn into a goopy mush again

>sick shit to the cow
>sees human babies drinking milk from tits
>sees calves drinking milk from utters

>"I think I'll pull on that animal's dangly things and drink what comes out."
Humans have milk as do most mammals So it wasn't

>I wonder if milk is edible

It was

>I wonder if this particular animal's milk tastes good to me

Some chef in NYC did it.

Why does it matter if they had the prior knowledge? You do realize knowledge has to come about initially to be studied later right? They were just the first to develop these methods.

>Most likely people just left milk out, because where else would you put it, and often it turns into curds and whey and our ancestors saw it and learned that it was edible and doesn't go bad very quickly so it became a good way to store the nutrients of milk over the course of months

Wasn't cheese an Arab discovery? You might get curdled milk leaving it out, but you don't get actual cheese without rennet, which was in the stomachs and whatnot Arab travelers used as waterskins. Milk+rennet+bumpy riding motion=???

I still wonder how someone discovered lobster was delicious

>I just caught this weird water pincer bug things
>I bet it's delicious with butter!

Humans have milk too and baby animals can be observed to get milk from their mother, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it's a potential food source once you already have animals in domestication and breeding.

Cheese and fermented foods including alcohol were likely accidental discoveries, likewise, the penicillin inoculation that results in blue cheese was the result of the environment in caves where they stored/aged the cheese because of the natural temperature/moisture control.
Aside from pure human curiosity people will eat just about anything from moldy food to shoe-leather if they're desperate enough from starvation.

>I think I'll pull on that animal's dangly things and drink what comes out

theguardian.com/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/mar/09/breast-milk-cheese-new-york

It's genius in hindsight but in the moment it's whatever works, countless people died through trial and error getting us to this point especially before empirical testing when literal poisons were thought of as cure-alls.

You're missing the point, they would have no concept of cheese to work towards making it, they would just know about the animal, feeding it, breeding it, getting milk and attempting to store what they harvest.
Cheese was likely an accidental discovery from how they stored some milk in animal stomachs.

Or do you imagine that they somehow studied the animals and milk and theorized about how to solidify cheese into a more storable form with no idea that it could take such a form? And why would they think to use the animal stomachs with no idea that they had rennet or any properties to transform milk into a form they didn't know existed?

You do that realise that even today many discoveries are made by accident without planning or intending to discover the thing they didn't know existed?

They ate just about everything from the sea, few sea-creatures are actually poisonous to eat and when you're desperate you'll try to eat anything.
The bigger issue with seafood is parasites which aren't immediately obvious and is probably why some religions banned seafood and pork.

Lobster used to be slave food. Prisoners were fed lobster as punishment. Indentured servants would require in contract to not eat lobster more than twice a week. It used to be the chitterlings and pig's feet of seafood. Its discovery is closer to, say, punishing someone by feeding him insects, than "hey this ocean cockroach is pretty good".

>Prisoners were fed lobster as punishment
It wasn't "used as punishment", they just complained about having it too often.
Keep in mind this isn't the fancy fresh lobster with drawn butter and a squeeze of lemon that you get in high-class restaurants.This was before refrigeration and other technology to contain lobster like they are now in big tanks of carefully controlled water and in a limited geographic area where there was an excess of lobster to the point they'd wash up on the beach.
The lobster that prisoners were getting was the leftovers that wouldn't sell, likely at least partially spoiled, and the way it was served was boiled to rubber to cover for the spoilage and mashed up shells and all.

The kind of people who spam "lobster is for prisoners" can't grasp the idea that food can be better or worse, because they get all their food from walmart and it literally all tastes the same

They see an opportunity to "stick it to the man" by revealing the "truth" that nice things are a scam. So they spam shit like this, see also "experts were fooled once by wine when they were lied to and the wine was tampered with, therefore wine is literally poison and you will turn gay if you drink it"

You don't go from zero knowledge to suddenly inoculating/incubating cheese with various cultures with the purpose of preservation.

Lots of the moulds used to preserve dairy and meat products are psychrotolerant. It's conceivable that people stored milk in caves that had a high spore count of such moulds/bacteria and neglected batches became contaminated but the "spoiled" product tasted good. Then people replicated this process and started honing it over time.

This.

Plus, bleeding cows is an option. Make a small wound in the neck and drink from it. Milk + blood = balanced breakfast