Got Lactase?

Randall Stephens

In a recent issue of Nature, Andrew Curry offers up the latest theories on milk and civilization in the West.  How and why did ancient herders supplement their diets with cheese roughly 6,800 to 7,400 years ago?  Who were these early cheese makers? What were the results of the new cheese diet and the later reliance on milk?

Says Curry:

farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

Diaspora: A Useful Idea

Kevin Kenny*

The word “diaspora” is remarkably popular. But what does it mean? 

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines diaspora as “The dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations,” giving as a secondary definition “all those Jews who lived

outside the biblical land of Israel.”

A Harlem "Back to Africa" announcement,
Negro Club, New York (1929). Courtesy of
the New York Public Library.

By this definition, diaspora is both a process (the scattering of Jewish populations) and a thing (their communities abroad). This double meaning is the source of much confusion.

Until recently, diaspora referred almost exclusively to Jewish history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many other groups—including people of African, Armenian, and Irish descent—adopted the term and molded it to their own purposes. As its illustrative example, the OED cites “[t]he famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.” Today, diaspora is applied to virtually every group that moves from one place to another.

The key period of expansion in the usage of diaspora was the half-century after World War II. The reasons are not hard to find. During the era of decolonization, globally scattered populations of African origin forged new transnational bonds of solidarity. Migrant and ethnic communities of Asian origin (e.g., ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and Vietnam or South Asians in East Africa) were expelled from their adopted countries. Global migration assumed a massive new scale. And the international recognition of refugees brought new attention to involuntary migration in particular.