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203during the 20 th century sutartines also became a symbol of Lithuanian national identity,and although you can still hear sutartines sung by University students and amateurensembles, the village tradition seems to be irreversibly lost.Of course, speaking of government politics and ideologies, we should not forgetthe vigorous and millennia-long fight that official churches conducted against the “outof-date”practices of singing and dancing to the old pagan gods. Historical records frommedieval Georgia (as well as many other countries of Europe) about the strict bansagainst the old traditional singing and dancing practices certify the ferocity of thisstruggle. We may never know the full extent of the direct and indirect persecutions thatthe bearers of the “pagan” and “horribly sounded” loud and dissonant polyphony haveendured in Europe only.All right, the reader might say, we briefly discussed the documented cases whenthe tradition of vocal polyphony was lost. Now, what about the opposite cases, or aboutthe documented cases when the tradition of vocal polyphony was born out of themonophonic singing traditions? That’s what we are going to talk about in the next “casestudy”.Case Study #3Who Can Drink Milk?Or the Origins of European ProfessionalPolyphonyI remember very well my long visits to my friend, now a decorated andinternationally renowned Russian tiger trainer Nikolai Pavlenko at Tbilisi hospital, wherehe spent the few last months of 1974. I remember very well how surprised I was towitness how much milk he was drinking every day. I was always a bit uncomfortablewith drinking milk, despite encouragement from my parents. I was told it was good formy health, but I always felt a bit heavy in the stomach after drinking even a half-cup ofmilk. Nikolai, on the contrary, seemed to be happy to drink a few litres of milk every day.I guess this feature is still with me, and when I eat my favorite cereal for breakfast, to thesurprise of my Australian friends, I eat it with mineral water instead of milk.Some readers of this book might not be aware that different human populationsdiffer quite drastically from each other according to their ability to absorb milk. Asscholars found out during the second part of the 20 th century, there are certain humanpopulations where people cannot drink the usual cow’s milk without heavy digestionproblems, pain in the stomach and some other uncomfortable complications. Forexample, it was found that African Americans have a much higher percentage of peoplewho cannot absorb milk than European Americans (particularly North and CentralEuropean Americans. Boyless, Rosenzweig, 1966). Later studies suggested, that thenumber of the populations that have problems with milk (or, more correctly, with lactose,the central ingredient of milk), is quite big, and includes populations of sub-SaharanAfrica, Arabs, most of the Jews, most Asian populations, Australian Aborigines andMelanesians (Flatz & Rotthauwe, 1977). And finally the scholars came to the quite