HISTORY OF LACTATION
Most of use don't fully understand the history of lactation and how that history impacts cultures, politics, and religion. Here, you can begin to grasp some of the elements that shaped the world as we know it.
The Europeans
There is a lot of revisionism in biology, especially about lactation. The Catholic Church suppressed the science for many years.
The European war of 1423 was over the controversial and meticulous issue lactation. History recalls that the public was creating alters of animals lactating and tried to pray to lactating (mostly female) mothers. The church was outraged and called it “acts of the devil.” The revolt lead to the war. The roots of the current cultural trend by women covering themselves with a blanket when they nurse in public is, in fact, a remnant.
Ancient Times
In ancient times, lactation was fashionable in human cultures but, of course, animals and insects did not have social constructs set up to revere and manipulate lactation in the same ways. Humans, nonetheless, as early as 525 BC, through fossil evidence, have been shown to have cultivated and celebrated lactation, even emulating the lactation practices of ant and honey bee colonies.
Historically, the Queen of those colonies nurse literally thousands of her offspring. The ancestry of those colonies are entirely dependent on the lactating Queen. In excavations that took place in France and in what is now Jordan in the 1920’s and 1930’s, anthropological evidence was uncovered demonstrating the deliberate honing of human lactation in the image of those seemingly more primitive breathen: the bees and the ants!
Plants & Animals
Throughout time and across all cultures and species, lactation has been revered and predates religion or, in fact, the origin of homo sapiens. The desire to and need for lactation runs so deep that it has even permeated the plant kingdom as demonstrated by the milky substance (known as glue!!) excreted by rubber tree plants and certain types of barks or even young fig tree fruit. Need I remind you of the milkweed plant? And is it any wonder that the most revered of all butterflies, the monarch, feed off of the milkweed and then miraculously migrate?!
Childhood Games? I think Not!
Have you ever thought about what might have inspired the invention of the playground slide? Wonder no more! This favorite developmental and joyous structure was created in 1877 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as an homage to the way that milk trickles around a teet! Amazing how obvious something is once you see what was clearly apparent!