Just last night I was reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David Anthony and I was around the part of the book describing the lactose mutation and its spread across the world etc. Pre-historic time is pretty complicated, and interesting.
Its a fairly academic book oriented more toward the spread of proto-indo-european language and related topics. And I got the pointer to that book from a podcast delivered lecture series "WS3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period" a tolerable recording (tolerable from a technical standpoint; OK to listen to, but not going to win any awards for audio engineering). Its a recording of a class at Columbia from 2008.
My interpretation of the book and lecture series is people kept livestock for quite a long time before some mutant gained the ability to drink milk, which given the herd of meat animals meant they gained a lot of nutrition compared to the non-mutants, which is a huge survival gain.
I've found I enjoy university lectures much more now that I don't need to take midterms and write papers, so thats pretty much all I listen to.
Its a fairly academic book oriented more toward the spread of proto-indo-european language and related topics. And I got the pointer to that book from a podcast delivered lecture series "WS3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period" a tolerable recording (tolerable from a technical standpoint; OK to listen to, but not going to win any awards for audio engineering). Its a recording of a class at Columbia from 2008.
My interpretation of the book and lecture series is people kept livestock for quite a long time before some mutant gained the ability to drink milk, which given the herd of meat animals meant they gained a lot of nutrition compared to the non-mutants, which is a huge survival gain.
I've found I enjoy university lectures much more now that I don't need to take midterms and write papers, so thats pretty much all I listen to.