Lake Khövsgöl is about as far north of the
Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar as you can get
without leaving the country. If you’re too impa-
tient for the 13-hour bus ride, you can take a prop
plane to the town of Murun, then drive for three
hours on dirt roads to Khatgal, a tiny village nes-
tled against the lake’s southern shore. The felt
yurts that dot the surrounding green plains are
a throwback to the days—not so long ago—when
most Mongolians lived as subsistence herders.
In July 2017, archaeogeneticist Christina Warinner
headed there to learn about the population’s com-
plex relationship with milk. In Khatgal, she found
a cooperative called Blessed by Yak, where fam-
ilies within a few hours’ drive pooled the bounty
from their cows, goats, sheep, and yaks to supply
tourists with heirloom dairy products.
Warinner watched for hours as Blessed by Yakmembers transformed the liquid into a
dizzying array of foods. Milk was every-
where in and around these homes:
splashing from swollen udders into wooden
buckets, simmering in steel woks atop fires
fueled by cow dung, hanging in leather bags
from riblike wooden rafters, bubbling in
specially made stills, crusting as spatters
on the wood-lattice inner walls. The women
even washed their hands in whey. “Working
with herders is a five-senses experience,”
Warinner says. “The taste is really strong;
the smell is really strong. It reminds me
of when I was nursing my daughter, and
every thing smelled of milk.”
Each family she visited had a half-dozen
dairy products or more in some stage of
production around a central hearth. And
horse herders who came to sell their goods
brought barrels of airag, a slightly alcoholic
fizzy beverage that set the yurts abuzz.
Airag, made only from horse milk, is not
to be confused with aaruul, a sour cheese,
created from curdled milk, that gets so hard
after weeks drying in the sun that you’re bet-
ter off sucking on it or softening it in tea than
risking your teeth trying to chew it. Eas-
ier to consume is byaslag, rounds of white
cheese pressed between wooden boards.
Roasted curds called eezgi look a little like
burnt popcorn; dry, they last for months
stored in cloth bags. Carefully packed in a
sheep-stomach wrapper, the buttery clotted
cream known as urum—made from fat-rich
yak or sheep milk—will warm bellies all
through the winter, when temperatures
regularly drop well below zero.
Warinner’s personal favorite? The “mash”
left behind when turning cow or yak milk
into an alcoholic drink called shimin arkhi.
“At the bottom of the still, you have an oily
yogurt that’s delicious,” she says.
Her long trip to Khatgal wasn’t about
culinary curiosity, however. Warinner was
there to solve a mystery: Despite the dairy
diversity she saw, an estimated 95 percent of
Mongolians are, genetically speaking, lactosePOPSCI.COM
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