How do you think people realised they could drink cow's milk?

Question

I love social history and i always wonder what made that first person try drinking cow's milk (or any other animal's milk other than human milk). Along the same line - what possessed someone to eat a cow - what made people decide to cook the meat before eating it?
I think you get the gist of my question so give me some answers!

can i add:
if you think back to times when people were not as educated about things as we are today, what posessed them to drink something they had no idea about?!
it also goes hand in hand with eating ANYTHING that people know nothing about - if i was starving, would i really risk eating a berry that might just kill me?

Answer 1

Trial and error! How did they know to milk the cow and not the bull! LOL

Answer 2

Here’s my theory.
Domesticated animals like sheep, goats and cows were initially kept for meat purposes. The animals chosen were probably the ones that didn’t have an aversion to man and could be most easily captured. Rather than constantly capturing new animals, it was recognized that if you kept the animals long enough, they would mate and make little baby animals. Due to natural cycles in nature, babies of many animals are born in spring, when grasses are sprouting and there is plenty of feed for the mothers to eat so they can make milk. So at this point you have our forebearers in possession of a lot of milk factories.
In spring, humans are pretty hungry. After all, they just made it through winter. Now you can’t eat the momma animals because they are the factories that make more animals. In fact, you probably don’t want to eat the baby girl animals because they become momma animals later. But you can eat some of the little boy animals. To this day in fact we still eat spring lamb. So you have yourself some spring lamb. Now as any nursing mother will tell you, there isn’t a simple off switch for the milk, and when the breast gets full, leaks will naturally occur. So you have all these momma animals wandering around just leaking this perfectly good milk on the ground in front of all these hungry humans. Guess what? Got milk?!
Not only that, but as our budding pastoralists no doubt recognized from almost day one, if you milk the animal, it keeps making milk. And if you store the extra milk in the hide you got from the spring lamb, you get cheese and yogurt, eventually.

Answer 3

Trial and error. I suspect that some civilization was thirsty or starving. Humans are very adaptive so if water wasn't available or easily accessabile then people were going to start trying substitutes for it. I suspect some died from what they drank but eventually as the culture learned to distinguish harmful from non-harmful they discovered the creatures (cow) milk was beneficial to them.

Soon after the society would try to start figuring out how to domesticate the cows. Eventually they learned and through more trial and error found they could eat the meat, only when it's cooked though.

Answer 4

All through the power of Discovery!! Bum-Ba!

They may have happened by coincidence! For homosapians to learn more, they needed a source of protein - which they found in meat. This step then let them develop a language and make tools ect ect.

As for cows milk, they may have just made a logical link from observation. Us females feed our young-lings from breast milk - watching a young calf drink from it's mothers udder is like mimicry. But it may not have necessarily be a cow that they first drank from! Perhaps a goat or a dog or something....

As for cooking the meat, perhaps another coincidence! They trying to keep a sabre tooth tiger out of their cave, defending it with one of their wonderful new inventions fire! Then - uh oh - the sabre catches fire! Yay, we are saved! But hold on.....what is that lovely smell...

Incidents happen even in modern history - who would have thought to mix a cocoa bean with milk and sugar??? ALAS CHOCOLATE!!! Even modern medicines such as penicillin were found by accident.

What will we stumble across next I wonder??? ----- that washing your face with a dried out udder will keep your forever young? Though how that could be stumbled upon would be a very interesting story....

Answer 5

to milk the cow- they probably saw in the wild a calf suckling on the teat (hah I have always wanted to use that phrase) and realized their children (humans) do the same, so they decided to give the cow a whirl


meat to cook? well I know they'd dry it because it lasts longer... I am not sure if that's when they decided cooking was a good option or not

and experimenting with new foods/drinks = in times of desperation people do some pretty strange things

Answer 6

I think that some pervert that was into kinky things like fondling animals saw the udders dangling down there and thought "hmmm I think I will get off by sucking on them things" so they did. Then they realized that the milk that comes out tastes kinda like human milk and decided to start drinking it too. As for the eating of the cow, I think that was just hard-coded into the human genes as a predator-prey relationship.

Answer 7

a starving and hungry person will eat plain stone. whether that person is educated or not.

when hunger comes you just close your eyes and eat what ever you find.

some how some where back in the cave man history, the
HUMANS did everything and anything to stay alive.
whether the meat was raw or cooked.

in order for some one to stay alive that person will do anything. that should not surprise any one.
whether you are educated or not.

Answer 8

Early man was not stupid - they knew that mothers fed their infants on breast milk and saw animals doing the same. Once they had domesticated cattle, they were able milk the cows - before they were domesticated, imagine trying to milk a wild buffalo!!

Answer 9

I get the gist of your question, and will answer with other:

Just how did we find out what berries were poisonous and what ones weren't? How did we know we wouldn't melt or deteriorate over time due to rain?

I really get the impression that history doesn't know or can go that deep into these questions.

Answer 10

Okay, people weren't always as civilized as they are now...

When the people of one village captured and killed the people of another village they would use them for experiments, including forcing them to eat stuff they didn't know if it would harm them... (I'm talking back in early man time... cavemen or just beyond.)

Well if they forced them to eat the green berries and they crumpled up and died... "Nobody eat the green berries!" was the village rule.

Over the generations the rules got passed down and finally we had a pretty good idea of what we could eat and what we couldn't.




g-day!