I’ll have more to say about it later, but one of the things that struck me while reading “The 10,000 Year Explosion” by Cochran and Harpending is their theory of Indo-European expansion (p181): We suggest that the advantage driving those Indo-European expansions was biological—a high frequency of the European lactose-tolerance mutation (the 1390-T allele).
Certainly plausible since, as they point out, not only does it expand the carrying capacity of grasslands by a factor of 5, it confers greater mobility than other forms of agriculture.
But they also mention the widely accepted fact that the Indo-Europeans were mead drinkers—although they don’t mention the fact that mead was also so highly prized that it was routinely used in rituals—quite possibly because the highest concentrations of sugars—hence fermented spirits—available to them was honey rather than grapes.
Which is all my way of introducing the idea that ”The Land of Milk and Honey” would have had more significance to the Indo-Europeans than to a lactose intolerant group that didn’t have mead as its primary ritual drink.
This is something the Christian Identity folks should have picked up on but I don’t recall any references to that theory by them.
Poster Comment:
I think there may be something to this.
My last girlfriend became lactose-intolerant at the age of 40. Believe me, it is a very difficult thing trying to avoid all dairy products, although she has no problem with fermented dairy -- cheese, yogurt, kefir, etc. But imagine trying to avoid any dairy not fermented -- it was a horror going out to eat and then having to deal with her awful digestive upsets when she found she ate the wrong thing.