Tuberculosis and cattle

[A.D.]

I was reading apiece about Tuberculosis and cattle, milk and dairy products. It seems there are problems in Ireland, New Zealand and a few other countries today.
I was thinking would the introduction of cows milk into the  of people who were not used to it also leave them open to bacteria that would also be forign to them. This could devestat a population 

[A.D.]

This is http://tinyurl.com/2vqtglo and wikipeadia is where I got the idea from.
Wiki. puts the first case at 9,000 BC in the Near East.

[embPA]

It was probably the other way around, humans giving it to cattle over 100k years ago.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080708092231.htm

http://www.itwire.com/science-news/biology/15709-earliest-tuberculosis-found-in-12mil-year-old-human-fossil

[A.D.]

Thanks-embPA
I checked out the links and followed up a bit.
I was questioning the possibility that  the introduction of  cow's milk into the  of the Neolithic (presumably) farmers who did not drink cow's milk could have caused an epidemic. Following on that the old and very young would be the most at risk. The young having the gratest impact on population, hence genetic make up of the population.
So the human/cattle original transmission doesn't really matter its the amount of exposure.
It also stated on the links that darker skin led to lower vit.D and a compromised immune system. This was in homo erectus.
If we assume that the Neolithic farmers came from SE Asia they would have darker skin than people from the north. It has been suggested that the introduction of cow's milk came from the Steppe's or at least a fair degree further north than agriculture. So the farmers may have been more vulnerable.
The idea is that maybe a population was somewhat replaced by sharing milk spreading a disease unintentionally rather than violence, though it surely happened.
Disease seems the more efficient.
I'm no scientist but was hopting some one might pick up on it or whatever and get something.

[Jean M]

It also stated on the links that darker skin led to lower vit.D and a compromised immune system. ... If we assume that the Neolithic farmers came from SE Asia they would have darker skin than people from the north.

It's the other way about.

Some of the mutations for fairer colouring now carried widely across Western Eurasia and North Africa only occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. These mutations must have flourished in the era of the earliest farmers, because their d.i.e.t* was lower in vitamin D than that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors. So the mutations probably cropped up somewhere in the Near East and were carried by farmers into North Africa, Europe and eastwards from Iran into India.  But the selection pressure in their favour would be strongest in the more northerly latitudes, giving us the pattern we see today.

Good evidence of this spread with early farmers is the light skin colouring shown in many paintings and statues of the ancient Egyptians. Later migrations by Indo-Europeans no doubt reinforced the distribution of these mutations in Central Asia.
 
* The software of this board automatically removes certain words, so I have to use stops. Heaven knows why the objection to this innocent word.  

[A.D.]

JeanM
Thanks,I was hoping you'd reply with some insight as your stuff on the `The Peopling of Europe' is great. Does this bomb the whole milk/infectious disease idea completely.
Plagues from the East in other times seems to crop up quite a bit. Do you think that  disease would be more effective at wiping out a population than war.
The idea of any kind of systematically wiping out of a population over such a wide spread area and time frame seems a bit ify. I have a few questions that kind of bug me. 1 if the milk drinkers came in one quick swoop killing all (they could) before them wouldn't it require more  large scale organization than there was at the time amongst in `invaders'. 2 If the arrival of milk drinkers was more gradual  and unorganized, as I think it was, wouldn't have been less violent and have us a less dramatic effect. I've suggested TB as it is connected to cows and milk but could something else (eg a flu ?) have had the same effect. 3 Does the lactose tolerance introduction (and change in farming) mean that milk drinkers out breed non-milk drinkers over  x,000 years.4 If it did wouldn't it effect Y and X equally.5 Is there any thing following up one in the idea at all. I'm well out of my depth here.

[A.D.]

1 more question would there be enough documentation between the 2 peoples to make a difference, Even 1% and that deference magnified over time. We are talking mainly about the young of pre-breeding age, so I'm sure the effect would be greater.

[Jean M]

There is no evidence that milk-drinking herders pushed across Europe killing all before them like a plague of locusts. The exact relationship between them and the resident populations they encountered varied, as far as anyone can tell. 

In some places disease and/or climate change or other problems caused marked population crashes before the milk-drinking herders arrived. In other places the Neolithic population seems to have held up better. In some places (Greece, Iberia, Anatolia) there is ample evidence of warfare in the Bronze Age. In other places things seem quite peaceful at that time, but hot up in the Iron Age.

In Britain and Ireland farming did not arrive until c. 4000 BC and by that time the idea of milking had spread across Europe, it seems, for there is evidence of it in Britain right from the start of farming. So it wasn't introduced by the Bell Beaker people, though I don't know if the Neolithic farmers there were actually drinking milk, or making it into cheese and yoghurt, that don't trigger bad reactions in the  lactose intolerant.

If we suppose that the incoming Bell Beaker folk carried the mutation for lactase persistence, then that would have become a particular asset to their descendants in the Iron Age, when climate change clamped down on cereal farming in Ireland and to a lesser extent in Britain. That was a period of warfare and cattle-raiding, as people scrabbled for limited resources. It would also be a period of heightened natural selection pressure.   

[A.D.]

Right got the picture. I didn't realize the dairy/arable farming came together in Britain. Yet another question what about goats milk is it high in lactose too? Was it used for cheese etc before cows milk. It seems more popular in the Eastern Med now it seems quite popular in parts of Ireland (I don't know about all) they sell it in my local Tesco with the rest of the milk (if that's anything to go by). I never saw it in England.