ArticleScientific reports2014
Direct evidence of milk consumption from ancient human dental calculus.
Article in Scientific reports, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 75 papers.
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Who cites it
75 citing papers in PubMed, 243 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lifestyle Impacts the Oral Microbiome of Classical and Post-Classical Societies in Italy.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Caprine dairy exploitation on the Iranian Plateau from the seventh millennium BC.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Health and lifestyle in the Iron Age Italian community of Pontecagnano (Campania, Italy, 7th-6th century BCE).PloS one · 2026Article
- The Demodifier: A tool for screening modification-induced alternate peptide taxonomy in palaeoproteomics.PloS one · 2026Article
- Paleo-proteomic analysis of Iron Age dental calculus provides direct evidence of Scythian reliance on ruminant dairy.PloS one · 2026Article
- Making yogurt with the ant holobiont uncovers bacteria, acids, and enzymes for food fermentation.iScience · 2025Article
- A library of avian proteins improves palaeoproteomic taxonomic identification and reveals widespread intraspecies variability.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reconstructing medieval diets through the integration of stable isotope and proteomic analyses from two European burial sites.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The impact of dietary interventions on cardiometabolic health.Cardiovascular diabetology · 2025Review
- An unclean slate, discrepancies between food input and recovered protein signal from experimental foodcrusts.PloS one · 2025Article
- Automated High-Throughput Biological Sex Identification from Archeological Human Dental Enamel Using Targeted Proteomics.Journal of proteome research · 2024Article
- Oral microbial diversity in 18th century African individuals from South Carolina.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Increasing sustainability in palaeoproteomics by optimizing digestion times for large-scale archaeological bone analyses.iScience · 2024Article
- Palaeoproteomic investigation of an ancient human skeleton with abnormal deposition of dental calculus.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Microparticles from dental calculus disclose paleoenvironmental and palaeoecological records.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Ancient dental calculus reveals oral microbiome shifts associated with lifestyle and disease in Great Britain.Nature microbiology · 2023Article
- Extraction Protocol for Parallel Analysis of Proteins and DNA from Ancient Teeth and Dental Calculus.Journal of proteome research · 2023Article
- Curated cauldrons: Preserved proteins from early copper-alloy vessels illuminate feasting practices in the Caucasian steppe.iScience · 2023Article
- Dairying and the evolution and consequences of lactase persistence in humans.Animal frontiers : the review magazine of animal agriculture · 2023Article
- Human Archaeological Dentin as Source of Polar and Less Polar Metabolites for Untargeted Metabolomic Research: The Case ofMetabolites · 2023Article
15 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
23 authors at 9 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Milk is a major food of global economic importance, and its consumption is regarded as a classic example of gene-culture evolution. Humans have exploited animal milk as a food resource for at least 8500 years, but the origins, spread, and scale of dairying remain poorly understood. Indirect lines of evidence, such as lipid isotopic ratios of pottery residues, faunal mortality profiles, and lactase persistence allele frequencies, provide a partial picture of this process; however, in order to understand how, where, and when humans consumed milk products, it is necessary to link evidence of consumption directly to individuals and their dairy livestock. Here we report the first direct evidence of milk consumption, the whey protein β-lactoglobulin (BLG), preserved in human dental calculus from the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE) to the present day. Using protein tandem mass spectrometry, we demonstrate that BLG is a species-specific biomarker of dairy consumption, and we identify individuals consuming cattle, sheep, and goat milk products in the archaeological record. We then apply this method to human dental calculus from Greenland's medieval Norse colonies, and report a decline of this biomarker leading up to the abandonment of the Norse Greenland colonies in the 15(th) century CE.
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