"Oh, come on! This isn't food! This is what food eats!"
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 described unpublished results from a new study in which she tested 389 fly larvae from three species -- blow flies, cheese flies, and black soldier flies -- and found that the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 ...
I don’t think they purposely killed the child to eat it. I think the child might have died through natural causes or starvation and then out of desperation the others ate it after it had died. It has happened many times in dire survival situations.
"Oh, come on! This isn't food! This is what food eats!"
The tough part was strapping them to the bumper and not have the car flip over.
Speaking of survival, Srednik highly recommends the book FOLLOW THE RIVER by Thoms, the escape from Shawnee captivity by Mary Ingals during the French and Indian War.
Neanderthals, maggots and democrats, what’s the difference, so they were cannibals.
Could be... or maybe Fear Factor got it from that episode where Riker was in the officer exchange and was given live gach to eat.
No-it was my choice-he never understood why I did that, because his sense of smell was not offended by the odors of kimchee or fish sauce-or any other food, no matter how smelly it was. Like many country people, I will eat just about anything fresh-brains w/scrambled eggs, barbacoa, menudo, grilled rattlesnake, mountain oysters, even most odoriferous cheese-but if it has a rotted/fermented smell, there is no way I’m touching it.
I almost offended a Japanese neighbor of mine when she gifted me with a container of homemade soybean curd. She explained that it was for spreading on crackers, etc, as I opened the container, she was explaining how many weeks it had been fermenting-the smell would have gagged a hungry raccoon-it was all I could do to not gag as I thanked her and replaced the lid. MrT5 ate the stuff-said it was delicious...
“Donner party-please come to the front desk...
Or they may not have.
And where are they now?
“Live gach”-supposed to be best when it is very fresh...
And a more recent one, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.
https://www.history.com/articles/miracle-andes-disaster-survival
Good for the Neanderthals.
I like kim-chee, the fish sauce, not so much
Right in your genes, with the rest of your ancestors.
Served in a nice Romulan ale sauce, maybe...
Now that was funny!!
Maybe they preferentially ate their neighbors’ children.
Some of these inferences about the distant past are made on scanty evidence and necessarily involve significant guesswork.
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