The aboriginal absence of milking in the Andes elucidates certain cultural-historical questions about domestication as a process. Least persuasive is the argument that the quantities of milk were too small to make milking a worthwhile effort. The old saying “there is no excess” (e. g., insufficient liquid left over for humans once the young have suckled) could have been originally said of cattle, sheep, goats, or water buffalo. Early in her domestication some 7,000 years ago, a cow must have yielded only small amounts of milk to the person willing to extract it. The large milk volume associated with purebred dairy cows today does not predate the nineteenth century.
Indeed, in the face of a minuscule output, the key question is why peoples in the Old World started to milk in the first place. A German cultural geographer, Eduard Hahn (1896), had perhaps the most compelling insight about the prehistoric origins of milking. He believed that milking originally had a religious, not an economic, motive. Bowls of milk were offered to the lunar mother goddess, a cult that regulated spiritual life in ancient Mesopotamia where cattle were first domesticated. The frothy white substance that sustains early life had considerable symbolic power and thus ritualistic value. The quantity of milk extracted was incidental because it had not yet spread from a ritual use among the priestly castes to become nourishment for common people. Nonetheless, expansion of milk supplies to meet the cultic requirements gave an impetus to select those cows found to have large udder capacity and tractability to human interlopers. Slowly, over many generations of selective breeding, milk quantities increased; one result of this was that the original religious motivation for milking was forgotten, and milk became a common nutriment. In other words, the nutritional benefits of milk became recognized as a sufficient reason to carry on the custom.
Such a process was probably “invented” in one place - the Fertile Crescent of southwestern Asia some 6,000 years ago - and then diffused elsewhere. As this diffusion occurred, milking spread to other domesticated mammals. For example, camels, which replaced cattle in desert environments, were first milked by using the model of bovine milking that had begun two millennia earlier. In fact, Carl Sauer (1952) reasoned that because all the Old World herd animals have been milked, milking may well have been the general motive for domesticating them in the first place.
Quantity of milk aside, another reason put forward for not milking llamas and alpacas has to do with behavioral peculiarities of the species. This line of reasoning posits that a lactating female would not allow people to manipulate the vulnerable underpart of her body, as a defense mechanism to ensure sustenance to the offspring. A related assertion is that llamas and alpacas simply cannot be milked because certain pituitary hormones inhibit the lactating female of these species from releasing her colostrum or milk to any but her own offspring. Although these two characteristics may exist, they nevertheless do not explain the phenomenon of nonmilking, again because of the vast behavioral changes that all dairy mammals have undergone to eliminate their natural refusal strategies. At some point in their domestication, individual animals that did not respond to human intervention were likely to have been culled from the breeding pool. Subsequent generations of the selected species gradually evolved in directions more conducive to human manipulation.
The physiological intolerance of Andean people to milk (lactose intolerance) is still another explanation proposed for the historic nonmilking of llamas and alpacas. As in much of Asia and Africa, most of the native folk of the Americas cannot properly digest fresh milk after they have been weaned due to insufficient amounts of the lactase enzyme in the intestine to break down milk sugars (lactose) (Simoons 1973). When pressed to drink milk, Amerindians often suffer nausea and diarrhea. In Peru, for example, nutritional studies have reported that highland children experience an adverse reaction to milk (Calderon-Viacava, Cazorla-Tal-leri, and Leon-Barua 1971; Figueroa et al. 1971).
Yet, as with the arguments already examined, lactose intolerance is still not a convincing explanation for the absence of milking in the Andes. After the Spaniards brought cows, goats, and sheep to them, the Andean peoples followed the European example and began to milk these animals. They used the milk for infant feeding and cheese making. Nursing Indian babies can be fed fresh animal milk with impunity because they still have a high level of the lactase enzyme, whereas cheese is a low-lactose dairy product that many lactose malabsorbers can consume without ill effects. Cheese has another advantage over liquid milk: It is preservable without refrigeration and thus can be transported long distances. Cows’ milk predominates in making cheese, but in dry areas goats’ milk is also used. Cheese making from ewes’ milk has been an activity in the. Altiplano of Bolivia south of Oruro since the colonial period.
In summary, then, the failure to have milked llamas or alpacas was probably not due to their low milk production, nor to the innate behavior of this camelid genus, nor can it be attributed to the lactose intolerance of the people who have kept them. This leaves a disarmingly simple reason for not milking llamas and alpacas. It never occurred to the indigenes to do so. For those who appreciate milk, yoghurt, ice cream, butter, and cheese in their diet, this failure to grasp the possibility of milking may seem illogical. Yet the pre-Columbian civilizations of the New World did not employ several other basic traits of material and nonmaterial culture either, including the concept of the wheel, the arch, and any form of real writing. To this lack of invention must be added the failure of diffusion. Isolated by oceans, the. Andean people, prior to conquest, had no opportunity to learn about the idea of milking from European, African, or Asian peoples.
Moreover, the use of llama or alpaca milk for ritual purposes never emerged in the Andes as it did in the Fertile Crescent, although Inca state religion manifested many associations with flocks in its spiritual rhetoric and sacrificial practices (Brotherston 1989). The elaborate rituals concerned with fertility, curing, and divination that persist today in the high Andes do not involve milk in any way. It was camelid fat - easier to transport and less perishable than milk - that acquired the symbolic role in human needs to communicate with the supernatural forces.
As noted, Andean peoples first learned about milking cows and ewes from the Spaniards. It is puzzling, however, that after the introduction of milking, the practice was not subsequently extended to llamas and alpacas, particularly in zones above 4,200 m where they had no competition and where a kind of transhu-mance has prevailed. It is the case that the transfer of the idea of milking from one mammalian species to another has occurred within historic times. In northern Scandinavia, for example, after observing Swedish settlers milk their cows, the Lapps started to milk the domesticated mammal under their control, the reindeer. But although milking a lactating llama or alpaca might well have been tried on occasion over the past half millennium, it was not a practice that emerged as a use pattern or one that disseminated elsewhere. If milking these animals had been anything more than episodic, it would have been recorded in some travelers’ accounts and eventually in the ethnographic record.
Llamas and Alpacas as Future Dairy Animals
The milk of the Andean camelids has received little research attention. One study in Peru, which derived 256 milk samples from 71 different lactating alpacas, found that yields in a 12-hour period varied widely from only 15 to 20 cubic centimeters (cc) of milk in some to as much as 500 cc in others, with 300 cc as a rough average (Moro 1954). Butterfat content was found to be between 3 and 4 percent and the pH ranged from 6.4 to 6.8. Porcelain white in color and with no distinctive odor, the alpaca milk examined in this study was somewhat sweeter and more viscous than cows’ milk. These organoleptic characteristics contrast with the unusual flavor and salty taste reported for the milk of an Old World camelid, the dromedary, whose milk is nevertheless much appreciated in parts of the Middle East. More detailed biochemical data on camelid milk puts lipid content at 4.716 plus or minus 1.307 percent (Fernandez and Oliver 1988: 301). Development of either the llama or alpaca as a dairy animal would first entail the considerable work of selecting and breeding animals for higher milk yields.
Wider commercialization of the llama or alpaca as a source of food deserves consideration. They have potential as meat animals because their growth is fast: 9 kg at birth, they can weigh 29 kg at 9 months and 54 kg at 3 years (Bustinza Choque 1984). Carcass yield is reportedly higher than that of sheep or cattle. Although they can thrive on forage that extends well beyond the native Andean puna grasses, any serious herd investment would require better data on feeding requirements. Moreover, the prejudice against both meat and milk from these animals would need to be addressed in order to find profitable ways to market them to the public. North. America, which had an estimated 23,000 llamas and alpacas in 1990, is now the center for stock improvement and creative thinking on the considerable potential of these animals. However, both Peru and Bolivia, where the diversity of the llama and alpaca gene pool is greatest, have banned the export of live animals beyond their borders.
Daniel W Gade
Note
1. One dissenter to the otherwise solid generalization that Andean people do not milk camelids was William E. Carter, a trained anthropologist who died in 1983. Carter (1975) affirmed that llamas were milked, which prompted me to correspond with him about it. In his response dated February 28, 1975, Carter wrote, “I have on numerous occasion seen people making cheese out of llama milk and even eaten it. . . . Not much milk is obtained, of course, nor does the milking occur on a regular basis, but milking of the animal is done.” Carter, however, did not state the place or places where he purportedly saw this llama cheese, or if he actually watched those llamas being milked. Could these have been accidental cases of milk fortuitously salvaged from a lactating female that had just lost her young? None of the scholars who has intensively studied llamas or alpacas in their contemporary Andean setting alluded to them as even occasional sources of milk to their human owners (Flores Ochoa 1968; Webster 1973; Orlove 1977; Flannery et al. 1989).
William Walton (1811: 36), one of the earliest serious non-Spanish observers of llamas, stated that “her milk is scanty, and is never used by the Indians for any purpose, they prefer leaving it to the ‘llamitos’ which are not weaned before the age of six months.”
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World History
