Most adult humans around the world are lactose-intolerant, meaning that, once they were weaned from breast milk, they gradually lost the ability to consume animal milk and certain other dairy products without having digestive problems. However, the majority of people of European descent, especially those of northern and central European descent, are able to digest milk past infancy. This lactose tolerance is thought to be due to a genetic mutation leading to a dominant gene for lactase persistence (the enzyme lactase breaks down the milk sugar lactose in the small intestine).
There are several theories as to how this mutation became common enough to persist in a population. One idea has to do with famines and liquid milk. Thousands of years ago, millennia before refrigeration, animal milk would quickly turn to yogurt in warm climates, allowing lactose-intolerant humans to eat a nutritious and calorie-rich food (bacteria break down the lactose in yogurt, so even lactose-intolerant people can usually enjoy it). However, in the cool climates that prevail in northern Europe, the milk would have stayed fresh longer rather than fermenting into yogurt. In times of famine there, desperate people may have consumed the milk and, being unable to digest the lactose, suffered from diarrhea, possibly dying as a result of the combination of starvation and the ravages of lactose intolerance. Those lucky few in the population who had the lactase mutation would have survived with the boost of nutrition from milk and then would have passed on the gene for lactase persistence to their offspring. It is possible that, with enough cycles of famine, death, and the survival of milk drinkers, the lactase mutation became less rare in the population. If you can drink milk as an adult, raise a milkshake to your genetically lucky ancestors who may have lived through some very scary times to make lactose tolerance possible.