Posted on 07/26/2025 10:20:40 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...In 1991, researchers first revealed that the fossilized bones of Neanderthals had high ratios of nitrogen 15 compared with nitrogen 14 -- usually the signature of a high-meat diet... bigger meat eaters than even hypercarnivorous hyenas and lions. Butchered animal bones at archaeological sites reinforced the view that our close relatives relied heavily on meat from big game hunting.
...archaeologist John Speth of the University of Michigan... described accounts by missionaries and Arctic explorers of people who fell sick with "rabbit starvation" -- an illness that afflicts those who eat mainly lean, high-protein game meat and too little fat...
Speth's paper offered a clue -- he quoted Arctic explorers who described Indigenous people eating "thoroughly putrefied, maggot-infested animal foods as highly desirable fare, not starvation rations." Although eating rotten meat or fermented fish isn't common in Western diets, it's not unheard of: Beasley showed conference attendees slides of casu marzu, a traditional Sardinian cheese teeming with the live larvae of cheese flies...
Beasley... described unpublished results from a new study in which she tested 389 fly larvae from three species -- blow flies, cheese flies, and black soldier flies -- and found that the longer the insects fed on rotting tissue, the higher the nitrogen values of the larvae... the larvae of black soldier flies that feed on rotting tissue are about eight times higher... significantly higher than the nitrogen values found in animals and fish that humans hunt and eat, according to reports by Speth...
they're practically unavoidable when processing game outside. They are also easy to scoop from the soil beneath a carcass, she notes. And they're a salty tasting food full of fat and protein enjoyed by many modern foraging groups, according to Beasley's co-author, biological anthropologist Julie Lesnik of Wayne State University.
(Excerpt) Read more at science.org ...
Yup.
If you don’t have refrigeration, you can stretch that mammoth haunch by eating the maggots.
Or, bears do it, why can’t we?
Hard times, hard choices.
And the inner organs have fat... That is the trick with Rabbits and other lean animals. Eat the organs and cooking broth too. :)
During real hard times they ate each other. If the SHTF that is exactly what we will have to do.
Human Ancestors Ate Their Children 850,000 Years Ago
A chilling discovery at Spain’s Atapuerca archaeological site has revealed new evidence of systematic cannibalism among our earliest European ancestors. Researchers have uncovered an 850,000-year-old human cervical vertebra belonging to a child aged between two and four years, bearing unmistakable cut marks indicating deliberate decapitation. The find, recovered from the Gran Dolina site in the Sierra de Atapuerca, provides direct evidence that Homo antecessor practiced cannibalism on children as part of routine meat exploitation strategies.
In a press release, Dr. Palmira Saladié, a researcher with IPHES-CERCA and co-coordinator of the Gran Dolina excavations, described the significance of this dark discovery:
“This case is particularly impactful: not only due to the child’s age, but also due to the precision of the cut marks. The vertebra shows clear incisions at key anatomical points for detaching the head. It’s direct evidence that this child was processed like any other prey.”
The Preface of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It re- ported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream-and in it were found frozen speci- mens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish. or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and de- voured them with relish on the spot.
The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.
As for us, however-we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.
We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.
And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the
pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psycho- logical sense, fused into a continent-an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.
But, as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago, they kept their silence.
By an unexpected tum of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: “No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.”
But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”
Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some im- probable salamander.
I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents. And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them? Those who do not wish to recall have already had enough time- and will have more-to destroy all the documents, down to the
. very last one.
I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as
something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy tum of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander-which, incidentally, is still alive.
Look up Roman Garum or Vietnamese Fish Sauce.
If you weren’t supposed to eat it, God wouldn’t have made it out of meat.
Ewww! MrT5 loved that disgusting fish sauce-anytime he knew
I was going to the Far East food store in the nearest real town, he wanted me to bring fish sauce and kimchee for him. Both of those food items make me gag-I would sit at the breakfast island to eat dinner when he was dining on either of those things so I did not have to smell them...
Slimy, yet satisfying.
Probably should be "Some" or that "Some people ate other peoples children".
I suspect that there are still some people who eat children even today who may do this just because it is deliberately evil.
they would do really well on fear factor
Road kill mammoth was hard to find so people had to go hunt them.
““Warning: contains formerly living things.”
Hey at least it’s Organic.
he made you sit at the island?
put him on the back porch
Gosh, I did not know that there were politicians in those days.
If you’re going to go that route, stock up on fava beans and a nice chianti.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Selections from the FRchives:
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