Dental 4 Less, Ancient dental plaque: A ‘whey’ into our milk drinking past?
Now a breakthrough by the international team, reported in the journal Scientific Reports, provides the first direct evidence of milk drinking from an increasingly important archaeological reservoir — human dental calculus, a mineralized form of dental plaque. Using the latest mass spectrometry-based techniques for ancient protein sequencing, the team detected a milk protein, beta-lactoglobulin (which they had previously reported from a modern dental plaque sample) in ancient remains.