The nutriments that llamas and alpacas provide do not include milk, and the failure of humans to milk these domesticated herd animals raises some important questions. Unfortunately, written sources have rather frequently contained misinformation, sometimes based on an Old World conceit about the cultural history of the Americas. Examples include assertions that llamas were used as mounts and to pull plows, and that alpacas have been beasts of burden. Encyclopedias, several geography textbooks, articles in Nature and National Geographic, and even a dictionary of zoology contain this error (Gade 1969).
Similarly, milk has been claimed as one of the useful products of the llama and alpaca, yet scholars who have studied Andean camelid domestication, ecology, and economy are silent on the subject.1 Analyses of the archaeological context by C. Novoa and Jane Wheeler (1984) as well as Elizabeth Wing (1975) and David Browman (1974) contain no hints that. Andean people kept any of the camelids for their milk. The Spanish chroniclers who wrote of the Inca say nothing about the native people using milk in any form from either species. Quechua, the language of the Inca and their descendants, differentiates human milk (nujnu) and animal milk (wilali), but that lexical specificity by itself says nothing about any possible human use pattern of the latter.
If domestication is viewed as a process rather than a sudden occurrence, one might suppose that llamas and alpacas were developed for their milk. If we accept the reports of archaeologists who specialize in camelid bones, then it appears that domestication of the llama and alpaca had occurred by 4000 B. C. (Browman 1989). Thus, one or both of these camelids have been manipulated by humans for some 6,000 years, which (if time were of the essence in domestication) should have turned the animals into abundant milk producers.
If, however, a high level of civilization is critical in explaining the milking phenomenon, then one might expect that the civilization of the Inca (A. D. 1100-1532) would have developed this area of subsistence activity. The Inca knew enough about heredity to breed white llamas for state sacrifice and to have produced a plethora of food surpluses that testified to their skills as sedentary agriculturists and herders. The Inca and the various cultures that preceded them by a millennium were all sufficiently talented to have understood the enormous nutritional benefits of milk from their two camelids.
Milking would also have enabled a more intensive use of the grassy puna (highlands) and paramo above the altitudes permitting agriculture. As with cattle in the Old World, the milking (and bloodletting) of llamas might have heightened the value of pastoralism and thus encouraged a nomadic way of life. Indeed, the availability of milk would have given the Indians a sort of nutritional freedom to roam the high country above 4,000 m (3,500 m in Ecuador) at will, in search of good pasture for large herds. Certainly such activity would have been more facultative than the obligate relationship with agriculturalists that evolved in the Andes.
Llamas and alpacas have some habits in common that would theoretically predispose them to being milked by their human keepers. Both have a natural tendency to group in corrals at night. Their parturition occurs during the rainy period from January to March when abundant grass is available and the creamy surpluses of lactating females could have been removed with little deprivation for their nursing young. Finally, their general docility resembles that of sheep much more than cattle.
World History
