Making Milk: Mongolia’s Unique Role in Dairy’s History

Lecture by Christina Warinner, Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Milk is both ancient and enigmatic. First transformed into dairy products over 9,000 years ago in the Near East, its production required the domestication of not only animals, but also microorganisms. Dairy technologies spread across Europe, Africa, and Asia, reaching as far as Mongolia 5,000 years ago. Today, dairy products are produced and consumed worldwide; annual global milk and dairy production exceeds 900 million tons. And yet, the majority of the world’s population is estimated to be lactose intolerant. How did such an unlikely and often indigestible food become a staple of global cuisines? Christina Warinner examines the long and often surprising history of milk in Mongolia, where more than ninety percent of the population should be lactose intolerant—but is not. This talk takes a fresh look at the history of milk in Asia and its unexpected ethnographic and archaeological paradoxes. Far from familiar, milk is an ancient food with a modern scientific mystery at its heart.

Christina Warinner is Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and she leads international research groups at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology in Jena, Germany. Warinner specializes in the analysis of ancient DNA and proteins, and her research focuses on the study of ancient biomolecules to better understand past human diet, health, and the evolution of the human microbiome. She has conducted groundbreaking studies on the evolution and changing ecology of the human oral microbiome, including reconstructing the oldest microbiome to date from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal, and she has published extensively on prehistoric migrations, the origins and spread of dairy pastoralism, and the biodiversity of the human gut microbiome. She has published two books and more than 70 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

Warinner is the recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Exemplary Cross-Fields Award, the Federation of European Microbiological Societies Article Award, and the Shanghai Archaeological Forum Research Award. Her ancient microbiome findings were named among the top 100 scientific discoveries of 2014 by Discover Magazine, and her research on medieval women artists was named one of the top 10 archaeological discoveries of 2019 by Archaeology Magazine. She was named one of the Top 10 Scientists Ready to Transform Their Field in 2017 by Science News, and her research has been featured in more than a hundred news articles and programs.

Warinner is passionate about public education and outreach, and she designed the Dairy Cultures exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Mongolia, and she has been featured in documentaries produced by PBS NOVA, Netflix, and the genome sequencing company Illumina. She created the Adventures in Archaeological Science coloring book, now available in more than sixty languages, including many Indigenous and underrepresented languages. She is engaged in the open science movement, and her research group has been actively involved in improving scholarly communication, data sharing, and research transparency.