Archaeologists Found 7,000-Year-Old Baby Bottles. Here's What Was Inside.

[00:00:00]Before your baby was born, before hospitals existed, before written language, before we knew what a vitamin was, a mother was feeding her child. And she was doing it in the same way that you probably are right now.

[00:00:12]Breastfeeding is one of the oldest biological acts in human history. It predates human history entirely, but somehow I've managed to make it controversial, icky, political, uh, medicalized, and even a moral question at all. Today I want to take it right back to the very beginning. We're going to be looking at fossil records from our ancient ancestors through ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, through to wet nurses, the black death, the industrial revolution, and the Nestle scandal of 1970, right up to where science is today. So, this is the full history of breastfeeding.

[00:00:47]Welcome back. My name is Joanna. I'm a mom to two, a two and a half-year-old and a one-year-old. And I am generally on my channel making videos about um academic papers, research data um looking at evidence-based parenting to try and make informed decisions to become a better parent. So if you like the idea, please do hit like and subscribe. Now back to it. Let's not start with humans. Let's go back to our ancestors. The ability to produce milk is around 200 million years old. That's literally what makes us mammals. But the breastfeeding practices of our particularly evolutionary lineage, that's where it gets a bit more interesting. In 2019, two separate research teams published studies on fossilized teeth of Orrolopithecus Africanis, one of our earliest human ancestors that lived around 2 to three million years ago in what is now South Africa. They both used cutting edge technologies to look at the chemical signatures within the ancient tooth enamel. The verse team analyzed barium concentrations in the teeth. Barry is a mineral found in high levels of breast milk and it accumulates in infant tooth enamel as they nurse. And they found that a Africanis infants breastfed for approximately 1 year broadly similar to modern humans but this is shorter than our living great ape relatives like gorillas or ranutans who typically nurse for around 3 to 5 years. The second team used calcium isotope ratios which found that there was an interesting ratio across different homminin species in the fossil record confirming that the nursing behavior was already pretty diverse in the human lineage millions of years ago. And what both studies tell us is this that by at least 2 to 3 million years ago breastfeeding was already ecologically and biologically significant. the length of nursing shaped fertility, population spacing, and survival through seasons of food stress. Breastfeeding wasn't just feeding. It was a survival strategy baked into our biology. And the theme that breastfeeding is far more than food is one that you'll hear echoed throughout this entire story. Fast forward to anatomically modern humans.

[00:02:47]For the vast majority of human existence on this planet, hundreds of thousands of years, we were hunter gatherers. In those populations, breastfeeding was long, very long. Archaeological and anthropological research shows that pre-industrial societies globally, the average introduction of supplementary food like solid foods began at around 1 year of age with complete weaning typically occurring at about 3 years old. And this wasn't just cultural. This was a biological strategy. Extended breastfeeding suppresses ovulation through the hormone called prolactin.

[00:03:19]And this is called lactational aminora.

[00:03:21]It basically means that your period doesn't come back. But for huntergatherer populations living pretty close to the nutritional edge, spacing births around 3 to four years wasn't just sensible, it was essential for everyone. You can't carry two nursing toddlers through the savannah still gathering enough calories for everyone.

[00:03:40]The agriculture then changed. Around 10,000 years ago, humans began settling, farming, and domesticating animals including cows, goats, and sheep. and access to animal milk changed infant feeding entirely. In 2019, a team from University of Bristol published a study in Nature. They analyzed lipid residues, especially from ancient fat molecules, and they found inside small spouted clay vessels recovered from Bronze Age and Iron Age child grays in Bavaria. the the chemical fingerprints of these tiny vessels, some shaped like animals, small enough to fit into a baby's hand and with spout of a baby's mouth. They're basically prehistoric baby bottle and the inside revealed fats of ruminant milk, cow, sheep or goat. And the earliest of these such vessels um appear in Neolithic Europe around 5,000 BC becoming much more common through the bronze and iron age. And this tells us two things. That first of all, supplementing or substituting breast milk is not a modern invention. It's actually pretty ancient. And secondly, early weaning via animal milk shortens the interval of births, which could drive population growth. It almost certainly came at a cost to individual infant health because no animal milk is a complete nutritional match for human milk. Now, let's look at the ancient world, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. Now we reach recorded history and what a story it tells us. In ancient Egypt, breast milk was considered sacred, associated with divine life force, strength, longevity.

[00:05:13]Wet nursing, where one woman is breastfeeding another child, is documented in Egyptian papyrie as early as 3000 BC. Royal wet nurses had positions of enormous privilege, sometimes raising the pharaoh's own children alongside their own. In Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq and Syria, Babylonian contracts um between families and wet nurses survived from from around 1,000 BC. And these are actual legal documents specifying what a wet nurse could eat, how long she could nurse a baby for, and what compensation was owed if the child died. Bioarchchaeological research from Iron Age urban settings in what are now Lebanon and Syria found that city dwelling women were breastfeeding exclusively for around 6 months with complete weaning at about 2 and 1/2 years age which is much earlier the broader pre-industrial global average of around 3 years old.

[00:06:07]Researchers from Bournemouth University argue that this shorter nursing window may help sustain population growth which allowed cities like Sidon to flourish um as Mediterranean powerhouses. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, breastfeeding was threaded into mythology and medicine alike. The origin of the Milky Way was the spilled breast milk of the goddess Hero. Countless Greco Roman vote leaf offerings shaped like breasts have been found at temple sites left as a thanks for successful lactation um and healing of breast ailments. Ancient physicians wrote extensively about breastfeeding as well. Dannis of Ephesus, one of the most important gynecologists of antiquity practicing in Rome in about early um 2 AD discussed infant feeding at length in his treatise gynecology. Ancient and early medieval medical tradition broadly advised against feeding colostrum in the first few days after birth, viewing it as too thick and unsuitable for the newborn gut. Advice which we now know is completely wrong. Colostrum is packed with immunoglobulins and is arguably one of the most important things that a newborn will receive. And it shows how early ideas about milk quality began shaping practice in ways that persisted for centuries. In Rome, wet nursing was so normalized that was that there was reportedly a specific spot in the city, the columnar Lactaria, where wet nurses could be hired. Elite women employed wet nurses not because they couldn't nurse, but it was a mark of status. And this pattern would define the next 1500 years. Now, let's look at medieval Europe. In medieval Europe, wet nursing had become a highly organized, deeply class stratified profession. Noble women, including wives of merchants, lawyers, physicians, routinely employed wet nurses. The motivations were varied.

[00:07:59]Resuming marital relations sooner, breastfeeding was correctly understood to suppress fertility, being available for household and social duties, or simply the social cache of not nursing your own child. Meanwhile, the peasant women who nursed their own babies were also nursing babies of the wealthy and sometimes sending their own infants to dry nurses who fed them pap, which is bread soaked in water or animal milk.

[00:08:24]So, they prioritized the wealthy children over their own. The mortality risk of this was enormous. The medieval church sent contradictory signals though. The Madonna lactans, the image of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus was one of the most pervasive devotional images of this period which framed maternal nursing as sacred and holy. Yet the same cultural tradition perpetuated ideas that the mother's strong emotions or moral failings could pass through her milk, a belief that has no biological basis but had real consequences in practice.

[00:09:00]Medical writers including Hildigard of Bingan in the 12th century discussed the qualities of good milk and the character requirements for a suitable wet nurse.

[00:09:10]And then came the black death. The 14th century plague devastated wet nurse labor pool creating acute shortages and forcing many mothers to nurse their own children out of sheer necessity. The relationship between infant feeding and population survival has never been more visible. Now let's move on to the enlightened and the industrial revolution. By the renaissance, thinkers were beginning to push back. Arasmus of Rotterdam argued that mothers should nurse their own children, framing it as essential for the mother child bond. The enlightenment amplified this. Jeanjac Rouso in Emil in 1762 wrote passionately that wet nursing was was an unnatural corruption that mothers owed their children the milk of their own bodies.

[00:09:53]But the mortality data was unambiguous.

[00:09:56]In 1790, the Dublin lying in hospital recorded a mortality rate of 99% amongst babies not suckled by their mothers.

[00:10:06]Physicians across Europe documented again and again that the dry feeding of pap, raw animal milk, and bread grl killed infants at catastrophic rates.

[00:10:17]For the philosophical debate about maternal duty, the underlying biology was clear. Human milk kept babies alive in a way that nothing else could. But then the industrial revolution occurred, and this is where everything accelerates. In the late 18th century, women and children began entering factories across Britain and Europe in vast numbers. 12-hour shifts in mills and mines made on demand nursing physically impossible. The separation of mothers and their babies during the workday drove a massive shift towards artificial feeding. not by choice but by the structure of industrialized capitalism. By the mid 1800s, feeding bottle designs have um evolved si significantly. By 1865, German chemists called Liebbe developed and patented the first commercially produced infant milk, a powder of cow's milk, wheat flour, malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate.

[00:11:13]And it was sold under the name of Liebig's soluble food for babies. He marketed this as the perfect artificial breast milk. But he was wrong. The 20th century is arguably the most dramatic chapter in the entire history because this is when for the first time in the history of our species, breastfeeding was systematically replaced. Not gradually, not locally, but industrially and globally. By the early 1900s, infant formula feeding was marketed as modern, scientific, and superior. Hospitals began routinely separating mothers and newborns at birth. Babies were placed in nurseries on rigid schedules. And in some hospitals, women were given hormone injections to suppress lactation and in many cases without their knowledge or consent. By the late 1930s, evaporated milk formulas were widespread in the United States. And by 1950, over half of American infants were being formulafed.

[00:12:13]By the 1960s, in some industrialized countries, fewer than 20% of infants received any breast milk at all. All of this was happening while mortality data remained damning. Infant mortality in Derby in England was still three times higher in artificially fed babies than the breastfed babies at the turn of the 20th century. The data was clear, but advertising was louder. And in the developing world, scandal broke open.

[00:12:39]Formula companies facing a decline in marketing in the Western world as birth rates fell turned their attention to Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. In the 1960s and 70s, Nestle and other distributors ran free samples in maternity wards, dressed sales representatives up in nurses uniforms, and they ran campaigns linking formula with modernity and health. In countries without reliable access to clean water, this was catastrophic. Mothers who couldn't afford to feed formula diluted it. Infants died of malnutrition and diarrhea. In 1977, the Infant Formula Action Coalition launched a boycott of Nestle in the United States. A boycott that spread to Europe and ran until 1984. In 1981, the World Health Organization passed an international code of marketing of breast milk substitutes by 118 votes to one and the sole dissenting vote was cast by the United States. The code prohibited formula advertising, free samples to mothers, and gifts to health workers so they couldn't bribe them. At the same time, something quieter had been building. In Franklin Park, Illinois in October 1956, at a time where fewer than 20% of American breath uh mothers were breastfeeding, seven women gathered to talk about it. Their names were Marianne Thompson, Mary White, Mary Anne Cahill, Edwina Frolic, Mary Kerwin, Viola Lennon, and Betty Wagner. They founded Leche League in by 1981. They had over 4,000 support groups worldwide and they would eventually gain no state actor status at the World Health Organization, a grassroots organization of mothers reshaping global health policy. I don't know about you, but that gives me goosebumps. Now, the modern era. In 1991, the World Health Organization and UNICEF launched the baby friendly health initiative, a global program to transform maternity care around breastfeeding support anchored in what became the 10 steps to successful breastfeeding. By 2013, 54% of US hospitals had adopted formal breastfeeding supportive measures, which is up from 29% in 2007. The science has grown exponentially. We now know that human breast milk is not food in the conventional sense. It is a living biological flu containing stem cells, a diverse microbiome, and over 200 distinct uglyaccharides that selectively feed beneficial gut bacteria.

[00:15:11]Immunoglobulin A for pathogen protection and and hormones like leptin that help calibrate an infant's metabolic and neurological development. No formula replicates this. Not because formula scientists aren't trying, because they are, but because the biological complexity of human milk is extraordinary. The health outcomes as well are well documented. Breastfed infants have significantly lower rates of respiratory illnesses, gastrointestinal illnesses, SIDS, and ear infections. And long-term data shows reduced risk of um of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and certain childhood diseases like leukemias. In 2023, a study analyzing nearly 10 million US infants found that breastfed babies were 33% less likely to die in the post perinatal period compared with those who are not breastfed. For mothers, the evidence also includes a reduced risk of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, type 2 diabetes, and and postpartum depression. And yet global exclusive um breastfed rates for infants under six months old remain well below the World Health Organization's targets. But the barriers are structural. Inadequate maternity leave, no workplace support for expressing breast milk, lack of access to skilled lactation support, and the continued in many countries still unregulated marketing of formula to new mothers. So that's what 2 million years of evidence tells us about breast milk and breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is not just a parenting philosophy or a lifestyle choice or a moral position. It is one of the most ancient biologically embedded acts in our entire history as a species.

[00:16:56]It shapes our brain development, our population dynamics, our cities, our legal systems, our religious iconography. And in the 20th century, it became the target of one of the most aggressive commercial campaigns in the history of medicine. For most of human history, the question was never whether to breastfeed. It was who would do it, for how long, and what it meant for the family and the community around them.

[00:17:18]And now we have more research than at any point in our 2 million year story.

[00:17:22]We have the science. We have the data.

[00:17:24]What we still need though are the structures that support women and mothers or at least allow them to genuinely make an informed choice when they can't. It's about evidence, not ideology. Biology, not guilt. My child is screaming, so it's time for me to go.

[00:17:38]But I hope you like this video. If you like it, please do hit like, subscribe, let me know in the comments your thoughts, and I'll hope you see you for another video. I'm going to go and maybe breastfeed my children now because there are tears. I'll see you later.