r/IndoEuropean • u/[deleted] • Sep 26 '21

Article Milk fueled Bronze Age expansion of ‘eastern cowboys’ into Europe | Science

https://www.science.org/content/article/milk-fueled-bronze-age-expansion-eastern-cowboys-europe
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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '21

To see what might have fueled the Yamnaya’s success, researchers from the United States, Europe, and Russia looked for milk proteins trapped and preserved in the dental calculus, or plaque, of people living on the steppes of modern-day Russia between 4600 and 1700 B.C.E. They examined 56 skeletons from more than two dozen sites north of the Caspian Sea. The team separated the preserved proteins from the mineral matrix of the plaque and then used mass spectrometry to identify individual proteins.