Soru

In reconstructing prehistoric pastoralist diets, archaeologists historically relied on faunal assemblages—examining animal bone wear and butchery marks—to infer whether ancient communities consumed dairy. However, such zooarchaeological markers cannot definitively establish whether milk was ingested, or whether herds were maintained solely for meat and traction. The recent application of paleoproteomic analysis to ancient dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) has substantially refined this inquiry. Dental calculus acts as a stable, mineralized matrix that traps salivary and dietary proteins over millennia, shielding them from the post-depositional hydrolytic degradation that typically destroys loose organic residues in soil. By using tandem mass spectrometry to isolate species-specific peptides—such as beta-lactoglobulin, a milk whey protein—researchers can directly identify the consumption of ruminant dairy products in individual skeletal remains. Crucially, while genomic DNA in archaeological skeletal material often undergoes severe fragmentation and contamination by environmental microbes, the dense mineral lattice of calculus preserves peptide bonds, permitting unambiguous identification of dairy proteins even in arid regions where bone collagen preservation is notoriously poor. Nevertheless, paleoproteomics alone cannot determine the specific culinary processing methods (such as fermentation into cheese or yogurt) that prehistoric populations used to mitigate adult lactose intolerance, because distinct processing techniques often yield identical degraded whey peptide fragments.

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