10/21/2026
Facts That will Blow Your Mind
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Long before the first dinosaur took a step, a mother was already making milk.
Not a person. Not even close. But the recipe she carried has been refined across more than 300 million years, and it is still at work in new mothers today.
The dinosaurs themselves arrived roughly 230 million years ago. That means milk had a head start of tens of millions of years.
On Thursday, October 23, 2025, an anthropologist stepped into the Boitnott Room in Rebecca Hall at Bridgewater College and held a crowd for more than an hour on this one subject. More than 120 students were in the seats, along with a handful of faculty, staff and neighbors from the community.
Her name is Dr. Katie Hinde. She teaches at Arizona State University, where she runs the Comparative Lactation Lab, and her talk, titled “The Milk of Humankindness,” opened the college’s 2025–26 Endowed Lecture season.
Doors opened at 6:30 p.m. and the talk began at 7:30. Admission was free, with a livestream for anyone who could not make the trip.
Her first point was a blunt one. For years, people have heard that formula or cow’s milk can stand in for a mother’s milk, yet scientists still know surprisingly little about what human milk really contains.
What they do know is remarkable. Milk is food, but it also works like medicine. Its hormones help strengthen an infant’s immune system, and they help prepare the digestive system for the solid foods that arrive after weaning.
Then there are the sugars. Human milk holds more than 200 varieties of a complex sugar called oligosaccharides, and a baby cannot digest any of them. They are not there to feed the baby directly. They feed the right community of microbes, which helps keep harmful ones from settling in.
Hinde describes a mother’s milk as more unique than a fingerprint. Each mother makes it fresh for each stretch of nursing, shaped for an infant in a particular time and place.
Consider what those two ideas mean together. A substance shaped over hundreds of millions of years is also rewritten for every baby, every season and every place. It is ancient and brand new at the same time.
Her own research supports the idea. She showed that milk shifts with a mother’s geography and the traditional foods of her culture. The fats, proteins and other nutrients in the milk of a mother in an American city differ, in both proportion and type, from those of a mother in a rural community elsewhere in the world.
Here is what most people miss: the talk was never a lecture telling anyone what to do. Hinde said plainly that not every baby needs breast milk and not every mother needs to nurse. Her focus was the gap between what mothers hope for and what their lives allow, and by the figure she cited, about 60 percent of new mothers in the United States stop breastfeeding sooner than they wanted to.
That changes the question. It stops being about willpower and starts being about workplaces, policies and the research that supports them.
Her list of fixes was practical. Paid parental leave. Peer lactation consultants. More research into medications, because the risks of taking certain drugs while nursing are still not well understood.
Hinde has described infant feeding as contested ground, where moral judgments and limited options collide with both personal wellbeing and public health. That is a heavy load to place on one of the most ordinary acts in the world.
She was clear that breastfeeding is not possible, or not advised, in every situation. Adoption, a mother’s illness and families that do not follow a traditional shape all change the picture. She also stressed that protecting the benefits of breastfeeding goes hand in hand with vaccinating babies.
The history behind the numbers is striking. In the 1970s, breastfeeding in the United States fell to an all-time low, with as few as 22 percent of new mothers nursing for any length of time. Over roughly the last 30 years, that figure has been climbing, which Hinde was happy to report.
Then the lecture widened to something larger. Rising seas and disasters made worse by a changing climate are expected to push many mothers and babies out of their homes. In those moments, formula can be impossible to find, and a mother’s own milk is the one food supply that travels with her.
There is a quiet reminder of all this in our own vocabulary. In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus named the whole group of animals we belong to Mammalia, a word rooted in the Latin for breast. Of every trait he could have chosen, he picked this one.
Hinde’s own path started at Seattle Central College, through Washington’s Running Start program. She earned an anthropology degree from the University of Washington in 1999 and a doctorate from UCLA in 2008. Harvard hired her as an assistant professor in 2011, and she stayed until 2015.
Outside the classroom, she is known for a very different kind of project. In 2013, she created March Mammal Madness, a bracket-style tournament in which animals face off in simulated matchups and the public guesses who will win. The same year, she co-edited a scholarly book, Building Babies, published by Springer.
The evening was sponsored by the Anna B. Mow Symposium on Comparative Religious Ethics. It is a fitting home for the topic, since questions about feeding a child are also questions about values, fairness and what a community owes its newest members.
Every one of us began by being fed by someone else, and no amount of progress changes that.
