The extreme environments of the Tibetan Plateau offer considerable challenges to human survival, demanding novel adaptations. While the role of biological and agricultural adaptations in enabling early human colonization of the plateau has been widely discussed, the contribution of pastoralism is less well understood, especially the dairy pastoralism that has historically been central to Tibetan diets. Here, we analyze ancient proteins from the dental calculus (n = 40) of all human individuals with sufficient calculus preservation from the interior plateau. Our paleoproteomic results demonstrate that dairy pastoralism began on the highland plateau by ~3500 years ago. Patterns of milk protein recovery point to the importance of dairy for individuals who lived in agriculturally poor regions above 3700 m above sea level. Our study suggests that dairy was a critical cultural adaptation that supported expansion of early pastoralists into the region's vast, non-arable highlands, opening the Tibetan Plateau up to widespread, permanent human occupation.

Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution Griffith University Brisbane Australia

Center for Archaeological Science Sichuan University Chengdu China

Center for Tibetan Studies Sichuan University Chengdu China

Climate Change and History Research Initiative Princeton University Princeton NJ USA

Department of Anthropology Harvard University Cambridge USA

Department of Anthropology National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution Washington DC USA

Department of Archaeogenetics Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany

Department of Archaeology Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena Germany

Department of Archaeology Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology Jena Germany

Department of Archaeology University of York York UK

Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology University of Turin Turin Italy

Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology Jena Germany

Faculty of Arts Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Griffith Sciences Griffith University Brisbane Australia

Human Origins Program National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution Washington DC USA

Institute for Evolutionary Medicine University of Zürich Zürich Switzerland

Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology Kiel University Kiel Germany

isoTROPIC Research Group Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology Jena Germany

School of Archaeology and Museology Sichuan University Chengdu China

School of Social Science University of Queensland Brisbane Australia

Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology Xian China

Tibetan Cultural Relics Conservation Institute Lhasa China

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Extraction Protocol for Parallel Analysis of Proteins and DNA from Ancient Teeth and Dental Calculus