How comes East Asia is not known for dairy but Turks invented much of West Asian/South Asian dairy?

by paul_a_8002

As far as I know these products are Central Asian Turkic. But other East Asians are not known for dairy.

Why so different?

Turkic:

1-yogurt

2-labneh/chakka yogurt

3-doogh/aryan/lassi/shineena

4-geimar/ashta/sarshir

5-booza ice cream

6-iranian bastani sonati

7-cacik/mast o khiar/tzatziki

wotan_weevil

At least some of these are very old products, and were certainly not invented by Central Asian Turkic peoples, since they date to long, long before there were Turkic peoples in Central Asia. For example, yogurt appears to have been developed very early, by the 5th millennium BC, perhaps in Western Asia, Central Asia, or South Asia.

To go into this in more detail, the ancient dairy animals (sheep, goats, cattle) were domesticated by 6000BC, with the process beginning thousands of years before that. Horses were domesticated by 3500BC, and became dairy animals too. Their domestication led to the use of dairy products, and, in turn, the evolution of lactase persistence in some human populations. This last part is important! The normal human adult condition is lactose intolerance, and thousands of years of dairying has driven human evolution and now some human populations show high levels of lactase persistence (especially populations of northern European descent). This means two things:

  1. Fermented dairy products (with low levels of lactose) were important in early dairying. Fermentation was, and still is, important for the preservation of dairy products.

  2. Dairying populations with low levels of lactase persistence (and thus high levels of lactose intolerance) still make much use of fermented dairy products, while populations with high levels of lactase persistence (e.g., European) often consume much of their dairy unfermented, using fermentation primarily for preservation and flavour.

As dairying spread from the early centres of domestication (Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia), so did fermented dairy products. In addition to yogurt, labneh and doogh are also probably very ancient.

Dairying opened up new economic opportunities for people: pastoral nomadism. Combined with animals suitable for transport (horses and cattle, especially in combination with the wheel) revolutionised life across the Eurasian steppe. One great event was the Indo-European expansion from about 4000 years ago, from Central Asia outward to the west, south, and east. This brought the pastoral nomadism lifestyle to the ancestors of the Turkic peoples, who appears to have switched to it from their earlier agricultural economy.

Across Asia, the regions where dairying has been practiced for longer tend to have higher levels of lactase persistence. This includes dairying peoples as well as non-dairying peoples. Of Asian peoples with traditional dairying lifestyles, eastern Turkic and Mongolian peoples tend to have low levels of lactase persistence, Central Asian and India peoples intermediate levels, and Western Asian peoples higher levels. With Turkic peoples spread all the way across Asia from east to west, we can also see this geographic variation of increasing levels of lactase persistence from east to west; this is probably due to mixing with non-Turkic peoples.

What all of this means is that many fermented dairy products are very old, and predate any Turkic dairying, and also that Turkic herders made much use of fermented dairy products. The spread of Turkic peoples and Turkic languages spread the Turkic names of various fermented dairy products across Asia - the use of a Turkic name doesn't mean a Turkic invention.

Some products - of relatively recent invention - might well be of Turkic origin. For products of unknown age/origin, it's harder. Language can provide a clue, but not a reliable one. One pointer to a non-Turkic origin would be the use of a name of Persian origin in Western Asia for the product, implying a possible spread from Central Asia (or Iran or Central Asia, if you don't consider Iran to be part of Central Asia) to the west. Likewise, a non-Turkic/non-Persian name used in Iran and other Persian-speaking parts of Central Asia suggest a spread from the west.