... but thank the ancestors for gene quirk that lets us drink milk

PREHISTORIC people may have drunk milk thousands of years before evolving the ability to digest it.

Some 5,000 years ago most adults were unable to break down milk properly, which could lead some suffering painful cramps, wind and diarrhoea.

They lacked the enzyme lactase needed to deal with a type of sugar found in milk, with the very similar name of lactose.

Now scientists have found that humans consumed milk anyway, based on animal fat residues on more than 13,000 pottery fragments at archaeological sites, raising the question of how people in Europe evolved to digest the lactose in milk.

Researchers believe a genetic quirk let people digest lactose and survive and these people are now in the majority.

Mark Thomas of University College London and co-author of the study published in Nature, said it was ‘one of the most important genetic changes human beings have evolved in the last 10,000 years’.