How did ancient humans survive brutal conditions in ‘roof of the world?’ Theory emerges
Thousands of feet above sea level in the southwestern region of China, sits the Tibetan Plateau — also referred to as the “roof of the world.”
Known for its inhospitable conditions, the plateau gets more snow and ice than anywhere else on Earth, aside from the North and South poles, according to a study published April 12 in Science Advances. Despite the weather and lack of arable land, people have thrived in the region for thousands of years.
New research is giving experts insight into how prehistoric humans survived the plateau.
Dental remains from 40 humans found across 15 locations in the plateau revealed that populations relied on dairy as early as 3,500 years ago to survive, according to the study. Evidence shows that men, women and children across all social classes had access to dairy products, indicating its importance to survival.
“The adoption of dairy pastoralism helped to revolutionize people’s ability to occupy much of the plateau, particularly the vast areas too extreme for crop cultivation,” Nicole Boivin, senior author of the study, said in a news release from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
The data also revealed geographic differences in the importance of dairy, experts said.
Individuals who lived in the plateau’s less arable northern and western highlands had more evidence of the protein, according to the study. Meanwhile, no traces were found in remains from the agriculturally friendly valleys.
“We were excited to observe an incredibly clear pattern,” Li Tang, lead author of the study, said in the release. “All our milk peptides came from ancient individuals in the western and northern steppes, where growing crops is extremely difficult. However, we did not detect any milk proteins from the southern-central and south-eastern valleys, where more farmable land is available.”
There were also patterns following altitude, the researchers said.
Of the 40 individuals whose remains were examined, only those remains found at an altitude of around 12,000 feet above sea level or higher showed traces of milk consumption, reinforcing the idea of dairy’s importance in places where agriculture was not an option, according to the news release.
Proteins from goat, sheep, and possibly cattle and yak products were identified, researchers said in the release. Western Tibetans seemed to have a preference for goat milk.
The dental remains also indicated that this reliance on dairy began at least 2,000 years before what current historical records indicate, the study said. Early populations likely turned to the practice for survival as soon as pastoralism began to spread throughout the region.
“Ruminant animals could convert the energy locked in alpine pastures into nutritional milk and meat, and this fueled the expansion of human populations into some of the world’s most extreme environments,” Tang said in the release.
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