Posted on 10/06/2025 11:16:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
“The taste was delicious, and none of us suffered any ill effects from the meal.”
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Blue Babe bison lived twice. First, 50,000 years ago, the steppe bison (Bison priscus) wandered Ice Age Alaska until a lion brought it down. Its second life began millennia later, when scientists uncovered its perfectly preserved body from the Alaskan permafrost, where it had lain frozen since that ancient day.
The remarkably well-preserved bison was first discovered by gold miners in 1979 and handed over to scientists as a rare find, being the only known example of a Pleistocene bison reclaimed from the permafrost. That said, it didn’t stop gastronomically curious researchers from whipping up a batch of Pleistocene-era bison neck stew.
“Strong Pleistocene Aroma”
The unusual dinner party would play out at the Alaska home of palaeontologist Dale Guthrie who was instrumental in the retrieval of Blue Babe from the environment. Initial analyses of the bison’s collagen appeared to indicate the remains were around 36,000 years old, but more modern investigations changed this to 50,000 years.
Blue Babe’s speedy transition into a Pleistocene popsicle after its death meant that its muscle tissue was preserved comparably to that of beef jerky with fat and bone marrow to boot. With so much on offer, the research team decided to follow in the footsteps of Russian scientists who had come before them in introducing a little bit of the findings into an evening meal.
“To climax and celebrate Eirik Granqvist’s [the taxidermist] work with Blue Babe, we had a bison stew dinner for him and for Bjorn Kurten, who was giving a guest lecture…” wrote Guthrie of the event. “A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables.”
“We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.”
Neck Stew
As for why they opted for stew, “Making neck steak didn’t sound like a very good idea,” Guthrie told Atlas Obscura. “But you know, what we could do is put a lot of vegetables and spices, and it wouldn’t be too bad.”
A bit of culinary wizardry may have rescued the flavor, but nothing could be done to revive the contents of Blue Babe’s abdomen, which had evidently spoiled before the animal first froze all those tens of thousands of years ago. Evidence of predation by lions was found in Blue Babe’s neck where tooth fragments remained, but where they’d trimmed the bison’s neck musculature meant the tissue here froze very quickly and so – even 50,000 years later – when it thawed it was quite fresh.
“When it thawed it gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom,” Guthrie wrote. “About a dozen of us gathered… on April 6, 1984, to partake of Bison priscus stew.”
And in case you’re wondering how their constitutions fared after dining on 50,000-year-old meat, it seems they did just fine.
“The taste was delicious, and none of us suffered any ill effects from the meal.”
An earlier version of this article was published in 2022.
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Good point...............................
Walt
Have you ever tried mammoth, Joel?
Dr. Fleischman
"Tried"? What do you mean, try? Try, as in "eat"?
Walt Better than the finest air-dried beef. Grill a three-inch filet with onions, peppers. Marilyn Likes to jerk it, put in that teriyaki flavoring.
Dr. Fleischman
Walt, you telling me that you've found these before?
Walt
Oh, nothing like this, no. No, the odd cutlet here, a haunch there. But this this was a major payday.
There’s no telling what kind of stuff is buried in the frozen tundra of Siberia...................
I’ve got stuff in my freezer could be meat, could be cake. We’re not eating it. 😀
I remember reading a story about this. I thought it was a wooly mammoth that was enjoyed. Might have been a different situation.
They have been eaten as well!..................
Post WWII C rations had the same flavor. You had to be careful when you lit the cigarettes that came in each package.
In other words...the same as a steak at Sizzler!
😂
This is how the zombie outbreak started.
What?!? They had 50,000 year old bison stew and didn't call me?!?
Add a can of Cream-of-Mushroom Soup to ANY hunk of roadkill or wild game in the Crock Pot and it’s a Winner Dinner! :)
Bear Camp is over for the year, so I’ll be working on more Black Bear recipes over the winter; it has the flavor of beef, the texture of pork. No fat marbled in the meat; they keep their fat layer on top of the muscle just like I do, so cook it low and slow, Baby! ;)
Neighbors to our west used to raise Buffalo. It takes 5 years to raise one to maturity; that’s a LOT of grazing land, winter grain and water! Those things grew HUGE! They got good money for the meat; it was all the rage around here for a while; as the couple got older, it was too much work for them and of course, kids can’t WAIT to get off the farm, now. :(
I DO miss looking out the kitchen window and seeing the herd in the distance. Just everyday Black Angus beef cattle, now. :(
More proof that frozen meat and frozen food in general lasts in human time forever. I tell my wife this all the time food frozen at sub zero temps is frozen in biological time it’s inert and as long as it’s air right as in vacuum sealed “good” forever. I have eaten 5 year old venison found at the bottom of one of the garage casket freezers...Oh look that’s from a hunt in the late 2010s I remember shooting her lets do smoked and sous vide loin.
I 100% would eat 50,000 year old frozen bison, no doubt about it.
😊
“Apparently ‘freezer burn’ is fake news so people will throw out perfectly good eats”
Freezer burn is simply dehydration via sublimation of water directly into vapor form from frozen food. It’s a form of freeze drying. For meat you can just put it in a crock pot and let it rip for 4-6 hours you won’t be able to tell it was ever “freezer burnt” no meat ever gets tossed in this house I don’t bother to even vacuum seal store bought foam tray neat if it’s frozen it’s as is and if it dehydrates before it’s used from the freeze into the crock pot or instapot it goes. The pressure cooker also turns it right back to hydrated meat, same for a couple hours of sous vide bath.
Heck I have a homemade freeze dryer it’s a thick walled plastic tub with a sealed lid and racks plus a vacuum pump line out of a hole drilled in the top of one of the casket freezers. Pull a hard vacuum on it and whatever is in the tub sublimes its water out in a week’s time not as fast as the heated tray commercial kind but very effective for trek backpack food. Totally freeze dried in a week two at most then on a walkabout it’s hot water in a pot and boom hot food. No refrigeration needed. I have done beef stew, venison and hog chili, chicken tortilla soup, of course carne seca of a half dozen species raw and cooked they all freeze dry to fractions of their weight and totally pack / shelf stable at any temp.
“I would go with some Mede made with that 3,000 year old honey, and maybe some melted ice procured from drilling deep into an Antartic ice shelf.”
Don’t forget 5000+ year old bog butter from Ireland on top of 10,000 year old bread made with grain from the West Bank on Israel.
“Post WWII C rations had the same flavor. You had to be careful when you lit the cigarettes that came in each package.”
Canned food virtually never goes bad. People have eaten 100+ year old cans from expeditions to the Arctic or off the bottom of the sea.
One of the rights of passage in my old unit was on the first FTX the new guys aka FNG’s were given MCIs aka K rats from the Vietnam or Korean war age instead of the MREs the rest were eating. I have eaten MCI from the 1960s my dad was in the same unit 30 years prior and he said they feed him WWII actual K rats his first FTX so the tradition has been running since at least the Vietnam era with that unit.
“Add a can of Cream-of-Mushroom Soup to ANY hunk of roadkill or wild game in the Crock Pot and it’s a Winner Dinner! :)”
Andrew Zimmern is screaming at this...The beginnings of his show [Wild Game Kitchen] starts off with a monologue where he says
“For decades grandma used too throw the pheasant into the crock pot put a couple of cans of condensed soup on it and call it dinner”...
Both my grandmother’s did exactly this but not a crock pot old skool cast iron dutch oven into a 200 degree gas oven for one or actual wood coals below and on top for the other.
Love Andrew watch every show he does, we have meet couple of times in NYC back when I lived and worked there back of house on the line while at university. We still chat on X and meta, exchange foodie thoughts cool guy we share the same huge white beard and shaved bald heads.
Breast of Canada Goose is excellent that way. I add onions, too.
We had a local TV show way back with a guy who only cook with wild game. It was usually on a Sunday after some sporting/hunting shows, namely ‘Outdoor Wisconsin.’ The kids and I enjoyed that, and I learned a lot.
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