Dairy and millet in India

Lipids are found in the Indus Civilisation. Lipids are insoluble fats from milk; they stick to pottery.

The site is Kotada Bhadli, 2300-1950 BCE. This spans the notorious 2100 BC climate upheaval. It's a pastoral site rather than pure agriculture. I guess that's why they figured its pottery a good place to look.

This milk, further, came from a carbon-4 cereal. For India, they think "millets". Apparently there are variant types of this; Kiel University has studied central Asia at 2700 BC. Hardly anybody feeds even a millet to goats; not if cows or buffalo are present. South of the Hindu Kush the cattle would be indicus. They'd been domestic since the 5000s BC but maybe just for the yoke and the slaughter.

I don't think anyone in India could process lactose directly. Straight milk-chugging was rare even at the Tollense 1200 BC. But a new mother could use it... on her child, for early weaning. For adults, there are the cheeses and the butters and the yoghurts.

To me this implies that Indus traded indicus breeding-pairs for millet seedcorn, deep in the Bronze Age like the middle third millennium BC. This may well be mediated by IndoAryans who had, formerly, been eating the millet. Was Kotada Bhadli an IndoAryan village?

DAIRY 12/10: Rakhigarhi and others, from Akshyeta Suryanarayan et al.. Mature Harappan, 2500-1900 BC, followed by what they're delicately calling the "post urban" Late Harappan.