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First, consider fenugreek.

Fenugreek is an herb whose seeds are mildly spicy. It's not used much in Western cooking, but if you've had curry, you've tasted it.

Fenugreek also has medicinal uses: it can help alleviate asthma, and taken in quantity will produce mild hypoglycemia -- a good thing if you're a diabetic. (1)

But its most important medicinal use is as a galactogogue -- from the Greek, literally "milk-caller". If you're a nursing mother, and your milk has dried up, eating fenugreek seeds in any form (powdered and cooked in food, usually, but you can buy them as capsules in health food stores) will turn it right back on again. This no-kidding really works; a nursing mother who has gone completely dry can be restored to full milk production within a day or two.

This interesting trait has been known for a long, long time -- fenugreek is mentioned in Hippocrates, and its galactogic properties are discussed at length in Ayurvedic and Song Chinese texts. Makes sense, no? Herbal galactogugues are no longer an important part of modern medicine, but for most of human history they were an absolutely crucial part of the pharmacopium.

What's really interesting about fenugreek is that nobody knows how it works. It is known that the seeds contain a steroidal compound, diasgenin, which is a precursor to all sorts of bioactive agents including progesterone. But that alone doesn't explain it -- diasgenin, by itself, is not a galactogogue. Fenugreek seeds do contain a lot of other compounds, from coumanids to bioactive gums to hydroxyisoleucine, so there's probably some sort of synergy going on, but nobody knows for sure. Since there are plenty of galactogogues on the market today, nobody seems all that interested; research proceeds, but at a rather modest pace. (2)

Now consider mother's milk.

Milk is full of all sorts of good stuff: protein, sugar, vitamins. It's also full of stuff that helps the baby a little more actively. Milk is literally crawling with neutrophils and macrophages (types of white blood cell), B and T lymphocytes, and antibodies. The mother's body pumps these tiny protectors into the milk, and the baby ingests them. Some stay in the baby's gut, while others pass through into the bloodstream. They provide immune protection to the baby while the infant immune system is still booting up.

Interestingly, it now appears that maternal antibodies also help /program/ baby's immune system. That is, not only do they protect directly, but their presence stimulates the baby to produce the same sorts of antibodies. So if Mom has resistance to a particular pathogen, she can pass both short-term and permanent resistance to her baby.

Unfortunately, it's only limited resistance. That is, the nursing baby doesn't get the same level of immunity as the mother; the kid gets some benefit, but not all. If Mom has, say, 100% resistance, baby might get 10% or 20%. The reason for this is unclear, but it may just be that it's hard to transfer a complete immune system orally. (3) Still, partial immunity is better than none; and this is why breast-fed infants tend to be quite a bit healthier than bottle babies. (4)

Note that this process of non-genetic inheritance allows human populations to "evolve" resistance to new diseases somewhat faster than they could if they had to rely purely on natural selection.

So WI it could be speeded up?

Postulate an alt-Fenugreek... let's call it sweetleaf. It's a member of the peanut and chickpea family, it's modestly tasty, it's a galactogogue. Grows across the warm temperate Old World, known to the Greeks and Indians and (a bit later) the Chinese.

But: it also enhances the efficiency of milk-mediated antigen transfer by about an order of magnitude. If a mother snacks on sweetleaf while nursing, her immune system will be more or less cut-and-pasted onto her infant, intact. If she has survived, say, smallpox, then baby will be fully immune too.

So. Now what?

A couple of thoughts:

1) Would the immune-boosting effect even get noticed? It's affecting the babies, not the mothers. Today we watch the diet of a nursing mother rather carefully, but I'm not sure that this was the case in a lot of premodern societies. And "I'm not dying of the pox today because Mom drank a lot of herb tea thirty years ago" is not an obvious etiology.

2) Assuming it's not, you have the interesting outcome of natural selection favoring women with poor milk production.

3) Assuming it is... well, the potential effects are actually pretty immense.

We've just made Old World populations quite a bit more disease-resistant. The demographic effects are going to be interesting, both in the aggregate and in detail.

This is one scenario where the high-level equilibrium trap actually looks half plausible. With infectious diseases greatly reduced in power, you might get Old World societies perpetually hovering at the edge of the land's carrying capacity. You might get a very occasional Black Plague, but -- onlike iOTL -- you wouldn't get it coming back every generation or so and continuing to depress population growth in the long term.

On the other hand, bigger cities. Might cancel out.

(Of course, you could make the herb native to the New World. That would have a completely different set of interesting effects...)

Thoughts?


Doug M.

(1) It's on the US FDA's GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) list.

(2) A partial list of some studies dealing with fenugreek can be found at

http://www.herbmed.org/Herbs/Herb75.htm#Category8Herb75

(3) To name just one obvious problem, the antibodies have to get past baby's stomach acids and digestive acids. Researching this point, I was delighted to discover that mother's milk has evolved mechanisms to help the antibodies do this; for instance, the antibody "mix" in milk is sharply tipped towards secretory IgA, which is the sort of antibody most resistant to digestion.

(4) It may also be why they're smarter, although that's speculative. The tentative hypothesis is that bottle kids suffer a lot more low-grade "subclinical" infections, doing subtle but lasting damage to delicate higher functions. Maybe.
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