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As a continent, Europe has got cheesemaking down to a fine art.

Whether it's aged Comte from France, Burrata from Italy or Cheddar from our very own gorge in Somerset, pretty much every country has something special and delicious to offer.


It has now emerged, however, that our ancient relatives were lactose intolerant for 4,000 years. This has been discovered thanks to DNA extracted from skulls dating from 5,700 BC to 800 BC that we carried the genes for lactose intolerance and yet for 4,000 years we ate milk and cheese anyway.

A study published in Nature details how when humans moved into the agricultural age, their genomes also changed, but it is only more recently that we have learned to tolerate cheese. The study took into account genetic information from 13 individuals who lived on the Great Hungarian Plain 5,000 years ago, which the study describes as "a crossroads of cultural transformations that have shaped European prehistory".

Lactose tolerance and the ability to eat cheese and drink milk with no digestive trouble is nowadays common throughout Europe, but it is a genetic variation that has allowed us to achieve this -- and a relatively recent one at that.

Even though we have been farming dairy for around 7,000 years and consuming it in the form of milk and cheese, it is only 3,000 years ago that the genetic variant starts to crop up in DNA, according to the researchers. It shows that while there were some immediate genetic changes that occurred as humans started to move from being hunter gatherers to doing farming and metalworking, it really has taken our bodies a long time -- and a lot of cheese -- to develop the lactose tolerance.