I don't see how that's surprising, at least if you subscribe to the Endurance Running Hypothesis (and I do). Any prey humans used to hunt using what we now know as persistence hunting would have been large game. Especially in the hot, tropic climates early humans seemed to have thrived in, such meat would have started to spoil, even if hunted fresh, before any such hunter would have had the time to bring it back to the family group, let alone consume it. Meats in general have a very short shelf life and if we look to the various independently developed preservation methods in human groups around the world, many of them seem to be centered around a controlled decomposition by "favourable" organisms (like the maggots in the seal story).
There's also the simple observation that no doubt many of us have already made: animals all around us seem to have no issues with partially decomposed meat. Dogs don't seem to mind it, nor do cats, nor do other primates like chimpanzees. It's obvious that at least in our very recent evolutionary history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
Why subscribe to the endurance running hypothesis, though? There are no contemporary examples of humans hunting that way, and hominids were already making tools by the time they had developed to subsist on meat. The endurance/persistence hypothesis doesn't even make sense without tools like spears, knives, or arrows, because humans don't kill their prey by biting into them. If they had access to primitive weaponry, why would they waste energy running when they could instead ambush? Even other species like chimps and dolphins, that can't chuck spears, hunt by surrounding their prey. The only reason the hypothesis is even a thing is because people find it confusing that we sweat so much.
If anything, the persistence running hypothesis in some way discredits the idea that hominids relied on rotten meat. If they could catch fresh prey, why eat spoiled meat? Yet our stomach acid has a very low pH, more acidic than even that of cats.
What's more likely, in my opinion, is hominids began to supplement their diet by eating the leftover kills of larger predators as well as any rotting carcasses they may have encountered, and then developed hunting strategies around when they began developing tools. Even having sharp knives made of stone or volcanic glass would have been an obvious advantage in food procurement, and it wouldn't have taken millions of years to figure out that slashing an animal's throat in the right place would take it down quickly. No need for persistence running at all if a group can corner a mammoth or buffalo or lead it to a dead end.
I really don't think whether the prey is big-game or not matters with respect to "spoiled" meat, however, contra to what some others here are saying, persistence hunting is (or was) a real thing. This paper [1] describes ethnographic examples of persistence hunting; heck, my grandfather described to me running down rabbits as a way of hunting them.
However, I would also argue that a more common approach, at least when there are multiple hunters working together, is to "herd" animals into kill zones such as pit traps, or channels. We have lots of evidence of those in the archeological record, such as here [2] and here [3].
I actually suspect that bacterial "preprocessing" of meat would assist in digestion. Rather famously, it is hard to get everything you need in a raw food diet, and a well known argument in anthropology is that cooking with fire is our way to make food easier to digest (rather than approach the problem the way, say, cows do). Fermentation can also improve the digestibility of foods (increasing bioavailability of calories, nutrients, etc.).
> It's obvious that at least in our very recent evolutionary history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
A few hours after reading this article, I realized that we're learning that exposure to peanut proteins at a certain age prevents peanut allergy.
I wonder if eating rotten meat during formative years similarly confers resistance to the ill effects of such meats. Or more generally, develops our immune response enough to where it's not a problem. (Akin to people in developing nations not having a problem with the tap water)
> It's obvious that at most in our very recent evolutionary history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
I wonder what effect that’s had on a humans immune system. I’d imagine eating spoiled meat containing bacteria, etc was giving their immune system a run for its money until a tolerance was built.
I would disagree that meat had a short shelf life. It is almost trivial to dry meat out and make jerky that will last a very long time. Doesn't even require advanced tools.
That being said, still agree with the premise. When you're truly hungry, food is food.
>It's obvious that at least in our very recent evolutionary history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
I would agree, both in terms of actual immunity and taste response, although generally-speaking eating rotten meat (especially when well-sourced) is not nearly as risky as common wisdom would make it out to be. Many folks in the deeper circles of online carnivoria dabble in "high meat" (fermented rotten meat, a method of preparing meat learned from Inuit peoples who would feed it to their dogs) and swear by it, even if the taste can be unbearable to the uninitiated.
I recall reading, a long time ago, of a person who was eating just meat and only meat for his diet. He was struggling for a while with it, until he intentionally allowed a small amount of meat to rot for a bit, consumed that, and from then on he did much better on that diet. The principle I believe was in play was that the rotting meat contained a lot of bacteria that was very good at breaking down that meat (it would proliferate the fastest) and that bacteria was taking up residence in his gut microbiome and assisting in digesting non-rotten meat in the future. Sort of like how herbivores will sometimes consume small stones to act as mechanical grinders of plantstuff in their stomachs.
This seems like the most likely way that ancient humans consumed actually-rotten meat, in small doses to edit their gut microbiome (likely encoded in traditions that viewed certain specific rotted foods as a delicacy/luxury - not because it was hard to acquire but because you were only supposed to eat it rarely). To the extent that you see claims that “ancient humans ate large amounts of rotten meat” I suspect they’re conflating that with merely “spoiled by modern food standards” meat, which is much less rotten than it sounds.
> To the extent that you see claims that “ancient humans ate large amounts of rotten meat” I suspect they’re conflating that with merely “spoiled by modern food standards” meat, which is much less rotten than it sounds.
The example from TFA suggests you are wrong about that -- at least judging by the rotten meat dripping with maggots:
"In one recorded incident from late-1800s Greenland, a well-intentioned hunter brought what he had claimed in advance was excellent food to a team led by American explorer Robert Peary. A stench filled the air as the hunter approached Peary’s vessel carrying a rotting seal dripping with maggots."
My gut refuses to believe it, but my brain understands that this is probably a lot like cheese -- blue cheese in particular. If you've only had fresh milk, letting it curdle and mold before eating it would probably be unthinkable. Same for fresh cabbage vs. kimchi or sauerkraut.
If you ever get a chance to go to a really nice steakhouse, and eat a 45-day or 60-day dry aged steak, do so. It’s one of the funkiest most delicious things I’ve ever eaten, like a combo of the best blue cheese and the best steak I’ve ever had.
I was unfortunate enough to eat some rotten meat at a restaurant in Tanzania when I was working there. The main part was not down, but it was hidden under some potatoes, and I only discovered it as I ate.
Took me months to recover from it. Up to that point in my life, I was totally "regular" as they say. It was probably a year before I got back to normal in that respect.
Don't mess with your gut flora if things are going well, imo.
He's very much in agreement, saying that the human pattern was to hunt large game and then bring it home to eat over weeks, evolving a highly acidic stomach as a result to deal with the bacterial load of rotten meat. That pattern was interrupted by the growing scarcity of megafauna, perhaps caused by human hunters.
"Archaeological evidence does not overlook the fact that stone-age humans also consumed plants," adds Dr. Ben-Dor. "But according to the findings of this study plants only became a major component of the human diet toward the end of the era."
So why rotten meat smells terrible and a steak delicious? Why would we evolve that perception of something that nutritious and which could prevent me from starving. Why my nose keeps telling me to keep away from rotten meant?
IIUC, the digestive system (and the gut bacteria in it) provide feedback to your taste buds over time.
If the appropriate "paleo diet" bacteria settled in (e.g. using the gradual method to build tolerance), your nose would probably change its mind soon enough.
There is an interesting related point in that cruciferous vegetables and allium roots synthesize specific chemicals which have been correlated with healthy effects. Many of these chemicals have significant amounts of sulfur and tend to smell quite strong not necessarily in a pleasant way. Olfactory associations seem to be complex.
The book The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson) describes how the Eskimos he lived with ate rotten fish all the time. It was a delicacy for them.
Kind of like we eat "rotten/spoiled" blue cheese and dry-aged beef.
But studies conducted over the last few decades do indicate that putrefaction, the process of decay, offers many of cooking’s nutritional benefits with far less effort. Putrefaction predigests meat and fish, softening the flesh and chemically breaking down proteins and fats so they are more easily absorbed and converted to energy by the body.
That was my first thought seeing the headline. As long as it can be stomached, it makes sense that we'd favor rotten food as a kind of natural over processed food that makes it easy to get at the nutrients. Another way to look at it is that the putrefaction is basically the same thing that happens once we eat it.
I'm not saying this is false, but it sure is setting off my BS detectors, so I'd be curious for other perspectives.
I was taught in school that Europeans traded and used spices specifically in order to mask the smell of rotting meat, and then learned later as an adult that was total BS. The story had seemed so tantalizing -- we were so primitive just a few centuries ago, thank goodness we're in the modern world! But nope -- rotten meat is just rotten meat and it's revolting period. Spices were expensive, and the people who could afford spices sure as heck weren't eating rotten meat.
And then I read this article and there are a lot of comments by explorers describing eating rotten meat -- but explorers were often trying to highlight just how primitive these "other" peoples are -- look at their disgusting practices, unlike civilized man!
And then the article also repeatedly conflates rotten with fermented, when these are quite different things with different effects. It also ignores the fact that something can be rotten on the outside, but once you cut those parts off, the inside is perfectly fine. That's the whole principle behind dry-aged beef, after all. And even in English, hákarl, which is fermented shark, is often incorrectly referred to as "rotten shark", presumably to increase the shock value for tourists.
And look, I'm an incredibly adventurous eater. I've overcome a lot of things that initially were aversions. But I simply don't see how you can overcome an aversion to actual rotting meat. It would seem to be on par with an aversion to eating feces.
What does seem plausible is that, as we know, fermenting and aging meat is a thing, and that people who aren't used to fermenting can find it disgusting and mistake it for rotting, and that explorers confused the two and sometimes even embellished their accounts for dramatic effect, again to highlight just how primitive these people were. But the idea that humans regularly ate rotten meat -- all I'll say is, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Do we really have that evidence?
This is a pretty interesting point about a carbohydrate source via animals:
> Western explorers noted that the Inuit also ate chyme, the stomach contents of reindeer and other plant-eating animals. Chyme provided at least a side course of plant carbohydrates.
I recently turned vegetarian, and I feel that (controversial opinion coming ahead) a vegetarian (lacto-ovo that is) diet is the closest thing to a Paleo diet we have today. The reason is that milk fats and egg yolk fat provide the most realistic balance of protein+fats that our ancestors previously exclusively got from eating animals whole where not just the flesh was eaten but also the organs (just as the article above confirms).
Also that the composition of milk and egg yolk fats is important here as they're similar in fat composition to animals derived fats (eg: saturated fat, a favorable omega 3 to omega 6 ratio, presence of fat-soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, etc.).
Extra: With both eggs and milk, it is easy to play with the protein-fat ratio by altering the whole egg to egg whites ratio and magnitude of skimming of milk respectively.
As an aside, most industrial meat is exposed either intentionally or unintentionally to lactobacillus strains. Working in kitchens I've had the opportunity to taste spoiling meat that had high amounts of it. When prepared right it is actually quite good. Taste can be similar to dry-aged steak, but juicer and more flavorful. I've never gotten sick, but it certainly seems like a risk, however tasty it may be.
Lactic acid fermentation [1] is the secret to many sausages. In the case of Mettwurst [2], made of raw meat, it is essential. Aged steak, hanged pheasants [3 - with a discussion of bacteria] - even today, the list should be long.
Yeah you can definitely lacto ferment meat, it's a major flavor component of the european dry sausages. Doing it safely isn't hard, but a lot of the nuances of that technique are towards making it actually taste good. It's very easy to lose control of water activity and get out of control rancid elements, or get air ingress and grow aerobic bacterias that clearly taste like rot, or too much oxidation of the fat, or the wrong mold.
Definitely pretty advanced level fermentation stuff, more to control and more serious consequences than making kimchi or something. Naem and other SE asian sour sausages are probably the most approachable entry point if you want to give it a swing though.
>“a gold mine of ethnohistorical accounts makes it clear that the revulsion Westerners feel toward putrid meat and maggots is not hardwired in our genome but is instead culturally learned,” Speth says.
These two statements aren't necessarily in contraindication of one another. The revulsion can be both hardwired in our genome and we can culturally train ourselves to ignore that revulsion.
I remember watching a video a few years ago about a present day tribe (I believe in SE Asia) that went on a hunt and killed a monkey. Due to the heat by the time the hunting party was back the meat had spoiled but nobody in the village had any issue with diving in and eating it. I would think that up until very recent times in human development this was very common.
I can say, that I grew up on "well done" meat... Even as an adult, It's taken years to get used to medium-rare steak. The texture of raw fish is still really hard for me to get past. It's definitely a learned thing, and the hyper-palatable "foods" we have today doesn't exactly help things at all.
Sadly for the cause of lolz, the subreddit where folks would trade tips about eating "high meat" and reassure each other that intestinal parasites are "totally natural, like our caveman ancestors had" went private a while back.
It's worth considering that our recent obsession with the "caveman diet" is the extension (and obvious continuation) of the early modern "noble savage" construct. It seems we ran out of culture clashes of colonization and now are trying to colonize the past to process our anxieties and dissatisfactions.
[+] [-] detuur|2 years ago|reply
There's also the simple observation that no doubt many of us have already made: animals all around us seem to have no issues with partially decomposed meat. Dogs don't seem to mind it, nor do cats, nor do other primates like chimpanzees. It's obvious that at least in our very recent evolutionary history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
[+] [-] ravenstine|2 years ago|reply
If anything, the persistence running hypothesis in some way discredits the idea that hominids relied on rotten meat. If they could catch fresh prey, why eat spoiled meat? Yet our stomach acid has a very low pH, more acidic than even that of cats.
What's more likely, in my opinion, is hominids began to supplement their diet by eating the leftover kills of larger predators as well as any rotting carcasses they may have encountered, and then developed hunting strategies around when they began developing tools. Even having sharp knives made of stone or volcanic glass would have been an obvious advantage in food procurement, and it wouldn't have taken millions of years to figure out that slashing an animal's throat in the right place would take it down quickly. No need for persistence running at all if a group can corner a mammoth or buffalo or lead it to a dead end.
[+] [-] jonnycomputer|2 years ago|reply
However, I would also argue that a more common approach, at least when there are multiple hunters working together, is to "herd" animals into kill zones such as pit traps, or channels. We have lots of evidence of those in the archeological record, such as here [2] and here [3].
I actually suspect that bacterial "preprocessing" of meat would assist in digestion. Rather famously, it is hard to get everything you need in a raw food diet, and a well known argument in anthropology is that cooking with fire is our way to make food easier to digest (rather than approach the problem the way, say, cows do). Fermentation can also improve the digestibility of foods (increasing bioavailability of calories, nutrients, etc.).
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695 [2] https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2018/07/18/pronghorn-trap... [3] https://torbygjordet.com/food/hunting/
[+] [-] leereeves|2 years ago|reply
I've recently seen proof of that. A dead horse was left on a trail I frequently hike, and I saw dogs eating it a week later.
I don't even want to imagine how awful that meat was after sitting in the sun for a week.
[+] [-] RajT88|2 years ago|reply
A few hours after reading this article, I realized that we're learning that exposure to peanut proteins at a certain age prevents peanut allergy.
I wonder if eating rotten meat during formative years similarly confers resistance to the ill effects of such meats. Or more generally, develops our immune response enough to where it's not a problem. (Akin to people in developing nations not having a problem with the tap water)
[+] [-] vuln|2 years ago|reply
I wonder what effect that’s had on a humans immune system. I’d imagine eating spoiled meat containing bacteria, etc was giving their immune system a run for its money until a tolerance was built.
[+] [-] a4000|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisco255|2 years ago|reply
That being said, still agree with the premise. When you're truly hungry, food is food.
[+] [-] hyperthesis|2 years ago|reply
Apparently the advantage of losing body hair is fewer problems with lice (consider how much time other primates devote to grooming)
[+] [-] Joker_vD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Connor_Creegan1|2 years ago|reply
I would agree, both in terms of actual immunity and taste response, although generally-speaking eating rotten meat (especially when well-sourced) is not nearly as risky as common wisdom would make it out to be. Many folks in the deeper circles of online carnivoria dabble in "high meat" (fermented rotten meat, a method of preparing meat learned from Inuit peoples who would feed it to their dogs) and swear by it, even if the taste can be unbearable to the uninitiated.
[+] [-] fwlr|2 years ago|reply
This seems like the most likely way that ancient humans consumed actually-rotten meat, in small doses to edit their gut microbiome (likely encoded in traditions that viewed certain specific rotted foods as a delicacy/luxury - not because it was hard to acquire but because you were only supposed to eat it rarely). To the extent that you see claims that “ancient humans ate large amounts of rotten meat” I suspect they’re conflating that with merely “spoiled by modern food standards” meat, which is much less rotten than it sounds.
[+] [-] dv_dt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyjon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teachrdan|2 years ago|reply
The example from TFA suggests you are wrong about that -- at least judging by the rotten meat dripping with maggots:
"In one recorded incident from late-1800s Greenland, a well-intentioned hunter brought what he had claimed in advance was excellent food to a team led by American explorer Robert Peary. A stench filled the air as the hunter approached Peary’s vessel carrying a rotting seal dripping with maggots."
[+] [-] forgotmypw17|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moremetadata|2 years ago|reply
Different bacteria make different chemicals which can be useful to humans.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7928036/
Is it any different to the Germans eating fermented sauerkraut, or Asians eating fermented Soy source?
[+] [-] jrootabega|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wincy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwayyy479087|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djaychela|2 years ago|reply
Took me months to recover from it. Up to that point in my life, I was totally "regular" as they say. It was probably a year before I got back to normal in that respect.
Don't mess with your gut flora if things are going well, imo.
[+] [-] hirundo|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=miki+ben+dor
He's very much in agreement, saying that the human pattern was to hunt large game and then bring it home to eat over weeks, evolving a highly acidic stomach as a result to deal with the bacterial load of rotten meat. That pattern was interrupted by the growing scarcity of megafauna, perhaps caused by human hunters.
"Archaeological evidence does not overlook the fact that stone-age humans also consumed plants," adds Dr. Ben-Dor. "But according to the findings of this study plants only became a major component of the human diet toward the end of the era."
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485
[+] [-] mzimbres|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvis|2 years ago|reply
If the appropriate "paleo diet" bacteria settled in (e.g. using the gradual method to build tolerance), your nose would probably change its mind soon enough.
Not a biologist, just a layman here.
[+] [-] m0llusk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferout|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exfatloss|2 years ago|reply
Kind of like we eat "rotten/spoiled" blue cheese and dry-aged beef.
[+] [-] jojobas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] version_five|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 years ago|reply
I was taught in school that Europeans traded and used spices specifically in order to mask the smell of rotting meat, and then learned later as an adult that was total BS. The story had seemed so tantalizing -- we were so primitive just a few centuries ago, thank goodness we're in the modern world! But nope -- rotten meat is just rotten meat and it's revolting period. Spices were expensive, and the people who could afford spices sure as heck weren't eating rotten meat.
And then I read this article and there are a lot of comments by explorers describing eating rotten meat -- but explorers were often trying to highlight just how primitive these "other" peoples are -- look at their disgusting practices, unlike civilized man!
And then the article also repeatedly conflates rotten with fermented, when these are quite different things with different effects. It also ignores the fact that something can be rotten on the outside, but once you cut those parts off, the inside is perfectly fine. That's the whole principle behind dry-aged beef, after all. And even in English, hákarl, which is fermented shark, is often incorrectly referred to as "rotten shark", presumably to increase the shock value for tourists.
And look, I'm an incredibly adventurous eater. I've overcome a lot of things that initially were aversions. But I simply don't see how you can overcome an aversion to actual rotting meat. It would seem to be on par with an aversion to eating feces.
What does seem plausible is that, as we know, fermenting and aging meat is a thing, and that people who aren't used to fermenting can find it disgusting and mistake it for rotting, and that explorers confused the two and sometimes even embellished their accounts for dramatic effect, again to highlight just how primitive these people were. But the idea that humans regularly ate rotten meat -- all I'll say is, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Do we really have that evidence?
[+] [-] dabernathy89|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MagicMoonlight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajnathani|2 years ago|reply
This is a pretty interesting point about a carbohydrate source via animals:
> Western explorers noted that the Inuit also ate chyme, the stomach contents of reindeer and other plant-eating animals. Chyme provided at least a side course of plant carbohydrates.
I recently turned vegetarian, and I feel that (controversial opinion coming ahead) a vegetarian (lacto-ovo that is) diet is the closest thing to a Paleo diet we have today. The reason is that milk fats and egg yolk fat provide the most realistic balance of protein+fats that our ancestors previously exclusively got from eating animals whole where not just the flesh was eaten but also the organs (just as the article above confirms). Also that the composition of milk and egg yolk fats is important here as they're similar in fat composition to animals derived fats (eg: saturated fat, a favorable omega 3 to omega 6 ratio, presence of fat-soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, etc.). Extra: With both eggs and milk, it is easy to play with the protein-fat ratio by altering the whole egg to egg whites ratio and magnitude of skimming of milk respectively.
[+] [-] 1MachineElf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zickzack|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_fermentation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst [3] https://honest-food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|2 years ago|reply
Definitely pretty advanced level fermentation stuff, more to control and more serious consequences than making kimchi or something. Naem and other SE asian sour sausages are probably the most approachable entry point if you want to give it a swing though.
[+] [-] fencepost|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyfon|2 years ago|reply
It is what makes the sourdough bread taste so good too.
[+] [-] elhudy|2 years ago|reply
These two statements aren't necessarily in contraindication of one another. The revulsion can be both hardwired in our genome and we can culturally train ourselves to ignore that revulsion.
[+] [-] dugmartin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] al2o3cr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] precompute|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenhearth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leobg|2 years ago|reply
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAB
A = How long Neanderthals existed (350 k years) B = How long modern agricultural societies have existed (7 k years)
Take into account earlier hominids, and the contrast is even starker.