13 ms·

Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

145 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

detuur 4y ago
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.
- vuln 4y ago
  > 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.
  - zadler 4y ago
    It might have been a good thing?
    - zikduruqe 4y ago
      Just look up the Hadza tribe's gut microbiome. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36238714/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36238714/ https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654 That's probably as close as you are going to get to truly paleo diets... not paleo-bros that eat only bacon, butter and meats.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        I was going to post about "paleo" diets, but you beat me to it. The Paleo Cafe would get closed down by the Health Department real fast if it actually served paleo foods.
        klyrs 4y ago
        I'm picturing a guy hauling a roadkill deer in, tossing it on a table and yelling "meat's up!" I mean, sure, they didn't have cars back then, but it's better than letting trash-eating deer meat go to waste.
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        I dimly recall a New Yorker article about people who eat roadkill. They do have their limits though. It has to be fresh roadkill :)
        klyrs 4y ago
        New paleo motto: "Maggots is protein"
    - vuln 4y ago
      I see how easy it would be for me at least to assume they had better immune systems from eating the spoiled meat. If true our modern immune systems are most likely way less effective than theirs at that time.
    - rybosworld 4y ago
      There does seem to be this notion that being "too hygienic" is a negative thing because it doesn't train your immune system. That's only kind of true. Exposing a healthy person to small amounts of weakened virus tends to build immunity. Exposing the healthy person to large amounts of the virus overwhelms the immune system and may not even lead to a strong viral immunity. If I had to guess, eating rotten meat is something that indigenous peoples have adapted to over time (and some individuals died along the way to that adaptation) and they are resistant to the specific things in rotten meat that make modern day humans sick. I think it would be wrong to suggest the rotten meat eaters are somehow better off for doing this, or that they have stronger immune systems in general. Immune systems aren't like a muscle that you can repeatedly train to get stronger and stronger and stronger ad infinitum. Immunity also comes at a cost. This isn't talked about often. But it's not "Free" for your body to learn and maintain immunity to specific infections.
      - legulere 4y ago
        Especially in the last years, the hygiene hypothesis is not about a lack of immune training against harmful microbes, but a lack of encounter of so called old friends, harmless microbes. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114
  - Retric 4y ago
    The major issue isn’t the bacteria but their byproducts. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism This is why you can’t render rotten meat safe by simply cooking it. That said, people still age meat. Small birds for will get left for 4-9 days in a cool space before being butchered etc. https://magazine.outdoornebraska.gov/2014/01/hanging-pheasants-wild-fowl/ https://magazine.outdoornebraska.gov/2014/01/hanging-pheasan...
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yep other than a couple notable exceptions like salmonella, this is the norm for food poisoning. It's intoxication from metabolic byproducts, not infection. Remains one of the biggest lay misunderstandings of food safety though. "Just cook it out" plus "your nose can tell" (it can't, spoilage microbes aren't usually illness microbes) are false beliefs that still get people killed.
      - foobarian 4y ago
        Curious about sources for this. I see some indication that botulism toxin can be destroyed by cooking, though the bar is pretty high - needs to be boiled over 5 minutes. So lesser temperature methods such as grilling the meat may not be sufficient, but something like stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.
        giraffe_lady 4y ago
        I'm not gonna have a peer reviewed journal article for you or anything. I learned this in the food safety class you have to go through before managing a kitchen in a lot of jurisdictions. > stewing over many hours seems like would work fine. It won't! Good luck with it though.
        foobarian 4y ago
        Well I get that would make sense in that kind of environment. Best way to not hurt your customers is to never even risk it - why would you? But my agenda is more selfish. I like to cold-smoke meats for adding to stews, based on the knowledge that stewing in > 85'C [1] water will destroy the botulism toxin. I could just stay away from cold-smoked meats to be safe; but then I would lose out on some of the tastiest food ever :-) It can be a confusing topic because there are 3 different things to worry about: the active bacteria, the spores, and the toxin. Of the 3, the spores are the most resistant to heat, and according to the WHO link [1] can survive multiple hours in boiling water. However the toxin seems relatively unstable. I really need to track down their sources though. [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 4y ago
  > Dogs don't seem to mind [spoiled meat] 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.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    That said, all the pets I've had throw up way more than I do. I think we're ignoring the very real possibility that ancient people were constantly living with some level of gastrointestinal problems.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > I think we're ignoring the very real possibility that ancient people were constantly living with some level of gastrointestinal problems. We do know that humanity from its earliest days over the Rome Empire [1] up to, what, maybe a century or even less ago has had massive infestations of all kinds of parasites, including gastrointestinal. Would it be possible that these parasites actually could have a symbiotic relationship, in helping to break down spoiled food? [1] https://www.livescience.com/53303-ancient-rome-infested-with-parasites.html https://www.livescience.com/53303-ancient-rome-infested-with...
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      I mean many modern people also live with constant gastrointestinal problems, and I'm not talking about teens eating taco bell and mountain dew every day and wondering why they have bathroom troubles, I'm talking about average people eating a varied and healthy diet with IBS.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        You're not wrong and that's an excellent example. I'm questioning the idea that somehow people were able to consume this food impact-free. I struggle with the common narrative that somehow people were healthier and better in some dark forgotten past and we should return to those times for our own well being. There often seems to be promises that conditions like IBS would stop existing if we did that. But maybe ancient man was cool with having near-constantly runny poos because there was no alternative.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Not to mention diet of the peoples living in tundra that includes such wonderful stuff as e.g. igunaq.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    Had to look that up. -- http://www.nmto.ca/sites/default/files/igunaq.pdf http://www.nmto.ca/sites/default/files/igunaq.pdf -- Igunaq-Aged meat Igunaq is fermented ( aged ) walrus or seal meat that has been cached away for future use. Meat is usually cached beneath stones or pebbles. Aged walrus meat is extremely high in protein, iron and vitamins. Igunaq has been traditional medicine to keep the digestive system clean, as it flushes away anything in its way. It is also great eating for those who have acquired the taste and can go beyond the smell. Too fermented, igunaq can be poisonous and can kill people. People have died from eating over-aged meat from walrus and polar bear. These two mammals are very rich in vitamins. The fat is often light green colored when the meat is aged properly. The fat will be darker green if the meat is over-aged or even brownish. Among Inuit it is a delicacy usually eaten with apples. To prepare the meat for eating people find that washing in cold water is better than washing with hot water. Cold water takes away the smell more. Igloolik and Hall Beach are known to have the best igunaq in Baffin Island. These two communities are blessed with walrus and proper gravel. Meat ages better when it is fermented in loose gravel. It takes time to make good igunaq. One has to store away the meat at the right season when it is not too hot or too cold. Temperature plays a big role. Cached meat is usually saved for the winter for people to eat but polar bears are known to steal the cache before people can claim them. Regardless the weight of the stones for caching, the polar bear will easily get at it. Polar bears are extremely strong animals. Common phrase...“ I wonder how many polar bears I have fed to date?” Meaning...Hoping that the cache is not eaten by polar bears yet. As noted igunaq is good for the digestive system as it cleans it completely of any foreign objects such as viruses and sickness a person may have. A person may experience a natural “high” if they have not eaten aged meat for a while. Men who grew up with igunaq are usually more physically muscular than those who have not. Igloolik, Hall Beach and Cape Dorset have muscular looking men compared to other communities on Baffin Island. It is believed that igunaq contributes to the physical appearance of the people who eat it. Igunaq is such a delicacy that people that have no access to it will fly it in from communities that do have good igunaq. Igunaq is often brought in at special occasions such as Christmas for community feasts. Some communities look forward to Inuit organizations having meetings in their communities...igunaq is surely to be part of the feast. Igunaq when on sale, will sell better than fresh meat. Interestingly due to its odor some airlines in the north will not carry igunaq. People often have to disguise it to get the aged meat on a plane to take them home. It is said that if you can get beyond the smell, you’ll enjoy the food as it is very nutritious and gives you energy and warmth....and you will be physically ready for your next outing. On a final note a full stomach will also make you concentrate better. Try it! It’s a true Northern experience! By Elijah Tigullaraq June 2008 -- end --
- Connor_Creegan1 4y ago
  >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.
  - finnh 4y ago
    Where did I last read about high meat, again? Ah yes, the Nov 22, 2010 issue of the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/22/natures-spoils https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/22/natures-spoils big h/t for "deeper circles of online carnivoria", you win phrase of the day
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Fermentation implies an intentional process that protects against spoilage. I don't think anyone considers sauerkraut or wine rotten food.
    - Connor_Creegan1 4y ago
      Good point, although I think whether or not animal flesh is "spoiled" after spending weeks or months fermenting in a jar might depend on who you ask.
  - prottog 4y ago
    > Many folks in the deeper circles of online carnivoria The wonders of the internet!
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    It's still done in some French cuisine/hunting practices, though much less common nowadays: "Faisandage", where small game can be left to rot in a relatively controlled way for months: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_de_la_viande#Maturation_et_faisandage https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_de_la_viande#Matu...
- ravenstine 4y ago
  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.
  - walkhour 4y ago
    > There are no contemporary examples of humans hunting that way. There are some examples [0], although admittedly they are isolated cases. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
    - burkaman 4y ago
      This is an unusually poorly written Wikipedia article with a very weird style and a lot of unsourced statements. I would be very hesitant to trust it without extensively reading the sources.
    - mhb 4y ago
      Running After Antelope: Scott Carrier's story of trying for twelve years to chase down and catch an antelope by foot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362140
- nathanvanfleet 4y ago
  My dog's propensity for diarrhea makes me feel less inclined to state that she has any tolerance for it.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    I've known dogs that have lived on very varied diets (including most human food sans poisons like grapes), and other dogs that had very strictly controlled diets because they were sensitive to pretty much anything and everything. Many breeds of modern dogs are very far removed from the lifestyle and habits of their wild brethren.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  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.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    That is a 'controlled decomposition' preservation technique like GP described though.
- hyperthesis 4y ago
  What's the advantage to not being able to tolerate rotten meat? Perhaps it's costly to tolerate it. Apparently the advantage of losing body hair is fewer problems with lice (consider how much time other primates devote to grooming)
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    There may be no advantage at all to not being able to tolerate. It may simply be there is no longer any advantage to being able to tolerate it, and thus no longer any pressure to select for the trait.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  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.). [1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695 [2] https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2018/07/18/pronghorn-traps-on-the-northern-plains-of-alberta/ https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2018/07/18/pronghorn-trap... [3] https://torbygjordet.com/food/hunting/ https://torbygjordet.com/food/hunting/
  - SubiculumCode 4y ago
    johnnycomputer knows his anthro. I attest.
- RajT88 4y ago
  > 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)
- a4000 4y ago
  The Australian aboriginals in the Sydney area forbade meat during the hot months due to this reason. http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/dharawal.shtml#burran http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/dharawal.shtml#burran
hirundo 4y ago
I enjoy the work of Israeli anthropologist Miki Ben-Dor on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=miki+ben+dor 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 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485
jrootabega 4y ago
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.
- wincy 4y ago
  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.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    The trick with a dry aged steak is that you don't eat the bits that were directly exposed to the air. The outer layer of the beef protects the inner from the intrusion of all the bacteria and spoilage that makes you sick and that's discarded and you cook the inner stuff that's had time to change but not go bad.
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    [dead]
  - runnerup 4y ago
    I've eaten a lot of 55-day dry aged steak and it always upsets my stomach a little bit for a day or two. I can consistently count on diarrhea for a bit. Tastes great, though. Too much Wagyu will do something similar, but its not really the same -- in that case its just mostly too much fat/oil. Even a small amount of 30-60 day dry-aged steak will do it to me and it feels different.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  I had very old chicken tikka once and it was exactly what you think. Funky, soft, and juicy. Not good!
1MachineElf 4y ago
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.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  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.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Lebanon bologna is a more commonly available fermented meat in the US. Much better stuff than the pink slime bologna.
- fencepost 4y ago
  Lactobacillus has been a part of human meat preservation for a long time. https://record.umich.edu/articles/underwater-storage-techniques-preserved-meat-for-early-hunters/ https://record.umich.edu/articles/underwater-storage-techniq...
- Zickzack 4y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_fermentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_fermentation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst [3] https://honest-food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/ https://honest-food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/
stefantalpalaru 4y ago
"It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores and omnivores. In the absence of good data on the pH of other hominoids, it is difficult to predict when such an acidic environment evolved. Baboons (_Papio_ spp) have been argued to exhibit the most human–like of feeding and foraging strategies in terms of eclectic omnivory, but their stomachs – while considered generally acidic (pH = 3.7) – do not exhibit the extremely low pH seen in modern humans (pH = 1.5). One explanation for such acidity may be that carrion feeding was more important in humans (and more generally hominin) evolution than currently considered to be the case [...]" - ["The Evolution of Stomach Acidity and Its Relevance to the Human Microbiome" (2015)](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134116 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...)
exfatloss 4y ago
The book The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- jojobas 4y ago
  Not just fish and not just Eskimo. Northern tribes rot whole deer, seal and even whale.
  - exfatloss 4y ago
    Interesting. But yea, it seems our digestive systems can adapt to it pretty well, given that we've been doing this since long before doctors were around. I suppose the acid kills all the bacteria in the rotten meat unless you're super weak immune wise.
    - jojobas 4y ago
      Not just that, there are toxins lethal to "normal" humans (i.e. cadaverine) that one can adapt to by eating small amounts as a child. Chukchi babies would get ever more rotten bones to suck on (i.e. pacifiers) presumably for that purpose.
dugmartin 4y ago
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.
al2o3cr 4y ago
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.
version_five 4y ago
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.
dabernathy89 4y ago
I can't wait to see all of the influencers who will feel obligated to post TikToks of themselves eating rotten meat now.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  You're looking for "high meat" and it's already a thing.
  - dabernathy89 4y ago
    Yuck.
precompute 4y ago
Not new, Aajonus Vonderplanitz talked about this for years. https://aajonus.online/ https://aajonus.online/
greenhearth 4y ago
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.
- leobg 4y ago
  It's probably not that silly, if you consider this: 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.
elhudy 4y ago
>“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.
BigCryo 4y ago
Scavenging explains many of the body traits that humans have.. are good binocular vision allows us to see long distances.. so prehistoric man may have been able to see buzzards surfing over a corpse miles away.. so then we began to ran toward the corpse but we had to run fast so that we could beat the other animals to it.. our skeletal structure allows us to run fast and the fact that we have little hair allows us to sweat and carry off the heat so we can run long distances quickly.. once we get to the corpse there are likely other animal scavenging it such as hyenas, and our ability to grasp rocks and throw them allowed us to throw rocks at the hyenas or whatever and scare them off the corpse.. then if there was even little meat left we could pick up a rock smash the bones and get the marrow out.. this explains how we got good long distance binocular vision, a skeleton that allows us to run, a body that allows us to carry off heat through sweating, hands and other anatomy that can grasp and throw stones, and smash bones to get the marrow out
- leobg 4y ago
  Also perhaps: hoarding, collecting and doom scrolling.
deleted 4y ago
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ulnarkressty 4y ago
There are quite a lot of videos on YouTube of people eating rotten meat, they claim it 'gets you high'. Perhaps one reason it's considered a delicacy?
bastardoperator 4y ago
I eat rotten meat all the time... in video games, and it hurts you.
- purpleblue 4y ago
  Blecch! Rotten food! The world spins and goes dark.
mzimbres 4y ago
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?
- bufferout 4y ago
  vegetarian for 20 years and cooking beef literally smells like dog poop to my nose. So yeah, maybe just a matter of what you're used to?
- m0llusk 4y ago
  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.
- hvis 4y ago
  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. Not a biologist, just a layman here.
  - rajnathani 4y ago
    > IIUC, the digestive system (and the gut bacteria in it) provide feedback to your taste buds over time. +1. Given the recent research on the gut-brain axis, I too believe that this mechanism is the case.
koliber 4y ago
Fish sauce, dry aged steaks, and bellota ham come to mind. All delicious, and while I’m not sure if you’d call them putrefied meat, it’s not that far off.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  Jamón is about as far away from "putrefied" as you can get; it's cured in salt for weeks and then hung to dry for months or years.
  - koliber 4y ago
    There is bacterial action at work to give it that delicious flavor. I don't know where the line is between bacterial breakdown of meat tissue in jamón and putrification. I wanted to highlight that bacterially altered meat is a delicacy today. Maybe people back then people were also looking for umami?
eqefqe 4y ago
I saw people on youtube who eat rotten meat on purpose.
djaychela 4y ago
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.
amriksohata 4y ago
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
fwlr 4y ago
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.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Kind of curious how much this may correlate to the fact that we don't dry age meat nearly as much as in times past.
  - animal531 4y ago
    Here in South Africa we have a thing called biltong which is basically thick slabs of meat that are cured and marinaded for 24 hours or so, then it's hung up to dry for about a week, depending on the size/dryness that you want. Overall it's a huge industry.
- moremetadata 4y ago
  Menaquinones are the naturally occurring form of vitamin K identified in bacteria. Different bacteria make different chemicals which can be useful to humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7928036/ 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?
tracker1 4y ago
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.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Or maybe the people who eat trash are the ones that never developed and that’s why they’re still eating trash today.
mromanuk 4y ago
How do they avoided the bad microbes, that can kill you?
- bpbp-mango 4y ago
  very acidic stomachs I assume > It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores and omnivores. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134116 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
rajnathani 4y ago
Amazing article. 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.
crazygringo 4y ago
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?

145 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

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.

vuln 4y ago
> 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.
- zadler 4y ago
  It might have been a good thing?
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    Just look up the Hadza tribe's gut microbiome. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36238714/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36238714/ https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654 That's probably as close as you are going to get to truly paleo diets... not paleo-bros that eat only bacon, butter and meats.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      I was going to post about "paleo" diets, but you beat me to it. The Paleo Cafe would get closed down by the Health Department real fast if it actually served paleo foods.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        I'm picturing a guy hauling a roadkill deer in, tossing it on a table and yelling "meat's up!" I mean, sure, they didn't have cars back then, but it's better than letting trash-eating deer meat go to waste.
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        I dimly recall a New Yorker article about people who eat roadkill. They do have their limits though. It has to be fresh roadkill :)
        klyrs 4y ago
        New paleo motto: "Maggots is protein"
  - vuln 4y ago
    I see how easy it would be for me at least to assume they had better immune systems from eating the spoiled meat. If true our modern immune systems are most likely way less effective than theirs at that time.
  - rybosworld 4y ago
    There does seem to be this notion that being "too hygienic" is a negative thing because it doesn't train your immune system. That's only kind of true. Exposing a healthy person to small amounts of weakened virus tends to build immunity. Exposing the healthy person to large amounts of the virus overwhelms the immune system and may not even lead to a strong viral immunity. If I had to guess, eating rotten meat is something that indigenous peoples have adapted to over time (and some individuals died along the way to that adaptation) and they are resistant to the specific things in rotten meat that make modern day humans sick. I think it would be wrong to suggest the rotten meat eaters are somehow better off for doing this, or that they have stronger immune systems in general. Immune systems aren't like a muscle that you can repeatedly train to get stronger and stronger and stronger ad infinitum. Immunity also comes at a cost. This isn't talked about often. But it's not "Free" for your body to learn and maintain immunity to specific infections.
    - legulere 4y ago
      Especially in the last years, the hygiene hypothesis is not about a lack of immune training against harmful microbes, but a lack of encounter of so called old friends, harmless microbes. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114
- Retric 4y ago
  The major issue isn’t the bacteria but their byproducts. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism This is why you can’t render rotten meat safe by simply cooking it. That said, people still age meat. Small birds for will get left for 4-9 days in a cool space before being butchered etc. https://magazine.outdoornebraska.gov/2014/01/hanging-pheasants-wild-fowl/ https://magazine.outdoornebraska.gov/2014/01/hanging-pheasan...
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yep other than a couple notable exceptions like salmonella, this is the norm for food poisoning. It's intoxication from metabolic byproducts, not infection. Remains one of the biggest lay misunderstandings of food safety though. "Just cook it out" plus "your nose can tell" (it can't, spoilage microbes aren't usually illness microbes) are false beliefs that still get people killed.
    - foobarian 4y ago
      Curious about sources for this. I see some indication that botulism toxin can be destroyed by cooking, though the bar is pretty high - needs to be boiled over 5 minutes. So lesser temperature methods such as grilling the meat may not be sufficient, but something like stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        I'm not gonna have a peer reviewed journal article for you or anything. I learned this in the food safety class you have to go through before managing a kitchen in a lot of jurisdictions. > stewing over many hours seems like would work fine. It won't! Good luck with it though.
        foobarian 4y ago
        Well I get that would make sense in that kind of environment. Best way to not hurt your customers is to never even risk it - why would you? But my agenda is more selfish. I like to cold-smoke meats for adding to stews, based on the knowledge that stewing in > 85'C [1] water will destroy the botulism toxin. I could just stay away from cold-smoked meats to be safe; but then I would lose out on some of the tastiest food ever :-) It can be a confusing topic because there are 3 different things to worry about: the active bacteria, the spores, and the toxin. Of the 3, the spores are the most resistant to heat, and according to the WHO link [1] can survive multiple hours in boiling water. However the toxin seems relatively unstable. I really need to track down their sources though. [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
leereeves 4y ago
> Dogs don't seem to mind [spoiled meat] 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  That said, all the pets I've had throw up way more than I do. I think we're ignoring the very real possibility that ancient people were constantly living with some level of gastrointestinal problems.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > I think we're ignoring the very real possibility that ancient people were constantly living with some level of gastrointestinal problems. We do know that humanity from its earliest days over the Rome Empire [1] up to, what, maybe a century or even less ago has had massive infestations of all kinds of parasites, including gastrointestinal. Would it be possible that these parasites actually could have a symbiotic relationship, in helping to break down spoiled food? [1] https://www.livescience.com/53303-ancient-rome-infested-with-parasites.html https://www.livescience.com/53303-ancient-rome-infested-with...
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    I mean many modern people also live with constant gastrointestinal problems, and I'm not talking about teens eating taco bell and mountain dew every day and wondering why they have bathroom troubles, I'm talking about average people eating a varied and healthy diet with IBS.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      You're not wrong and that's an excellent example. I'm questioning the idea that somehow people were able to consume this food impact-free. I struggle with the common narrative that somehow people were healthier and better in some dark forgotten past and we should return to those times for our own well being. There often seems to be promises that conditions like IBS would stop existing if we did that. But maybe ancient man was cool with having near-constantly runny poos because there was no alternative.
Joker_vD 4y ago
Not to mention diet of the peoples living in tundra that includes such wonderful stuff as e.g. igunaq.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Had to look that up. -- http://www.nmto.ca/sites/default/files/igunaq.pdf http://www.nmto.ca/sites/default/files/igunaq.pdf -- Igunaq-Aged meat Igunaq is fermented ( aged ) walrus or seal meat that has been cached away for future use. Meat is usually cached beneath stones or pebbles. Aged walrus meat is extremely high in protein, iron and vitamins. Igunaq has been traditional medicine to keep the digestive system clean, as it flushes away anything in its way. It is also great eating for those who have acquired the taste and can go beyond the smell. Too fermented, igunaq can be poisonous and can kill people. People have died from eating over-aged meat from walrus and polar bear. These two mammals are very rich in vitamins. The fat is often light green colored when the meat is aged properly. The fat will be darker green if the meat is over-aged or even brownish. Among Inuit it is a delicacy usually eaten with apples. To prepare the meat for eating people find that washing in cold water is better than washing with hot water. Cold water takes away the smell more. Igloolik and Hall Beach are known to have the best igunaq in Baffin Island. These two communities are blessed with walrus and proper gravel. Meat ages better when it is fermented in loose gravel. It takes time to make good igunaq. One has to store away the meat at the right season when it is not too hot or too cold. Temperature plays a big role. Cached meat is usually saved for the winter for people to eat but polar bears are known to steal the cache before people can claim them. Regardless the weight of the stones for caching, the polar bear will easily get at it. Polar bears are extremely strong animals. Common phrase...“ I wonder how many polar bears I have fed to date?” Meaning...Hoping that the cache is not eaten by polar bears yet. As noted igunaq is good for the digestive system as it cleans it completely of any foreign objects such as viruses and sickness a person may have. A person may experience a natural “high” if they have not eaten aged meat for a while. Men who grew up with igunaq are usually more physically muscular than those who have not. Igloolik, Hall Beach and Cape Dorset have muscular looking men compared to other communities on Baffin Island. It is believed that igunaq contributes to the physical appearance of the people who eat it. Igunaq is such a delicacy that people that have no access to it will fly it in from communities that do have good igunaq. Igunaq is often brought in at special occasions such as Christmas for community feasts. Some communities look forward to Inuit organizations having meetings in their communities...igunaq is surely to be part of the feast. Igunaq when on sale, will sell better than fresh meat. Interestingly due to its odor some airlines in the north will not carry igunaq. People often have to disguise it to get the aged meat on a plane to take them home. It is said that if you can get beyond the smell, you’ll enjoy the food as it is very nutritious and gives you energy and warmth....and you will be physically ready for your next outing. On a final note a full stomach will also make you concentrate better. Try it! It’s a true Northern experience! By Elijah Tigullaraq June 2008 -- end --
Connor_Creegan1 4y ago
>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.
- finnh 4y ago
  Where did I last read about high meat, again? Ah yes, the Nov 22, 2010 issue of the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/22/natures-spoils https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/22/natures-spoils big h/t for "deeper circles of online carnivoria", you win phrase of the day
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Fermentation implies an intentional process that protects against spoilage. I don't think anyone considers sauerkraut or wine rotten food.
  - Connor_Creegan1 4y ago
    Good point, although I think whether or not animal flesh is "spoiled" after spending weeks or months fermenting in a jar might depend on who you ask.
- prottog 4y ago
  > Many folks in the deeper circles of online carnivoria The wonders of the internet!
- MayeulC 4y ago
  It's still done in some French cuisine/hunting practices, though much less common nowadays: "Faisandage", where small game can be left to rot in a relatively controlled way for months: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_de_la_viande#Maturation_et_faisandage https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_de_la_viande#Matu...
ravenstine 4y ago
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.
- walkhour 4y ago
  > There are no contemporary examples of humans hunting that way. There are some examples [0], although admittedly they are isolated cases. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
  - burkaman 4y ago
    This is an unusually poorly written Wikipedia article with a very weird style and a lot of unsourced statements. I would be very hesitant to trust it without extensively reading the sources.
  - mhb 4y ago
    Running After Antelope: Scott Carrier's story of trying for twelve years to chase down and catch an antelope by foot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362140
nathanvanfleet 4y ago
My dog's propensity for diarrhea makes me feel less inclined to state that she has any tolerance for it.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  I've known dogs that have lived on very varied diets (including most human food sans poisons like grapes), and other dogs that had very strictly controlled diets because they were sensitive to pretty much anything and everything. Many breeds of modern dogs are very far removed from the lifestyle and habits of their wild brethren.
chrisco255 4y ago
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.
- OJFord 4y ago
  That is a 'controlled decomposition' preservation technique like GP described though.
hyperthesis 4y ago
What's the advantage to not being able to tolerate rotten meat? Perhaps it's costly to tolerate it. Apparently the advantage of losing body hair is fewer problems with lice (consider how much time other primates devote to grooming)
- nkrisc 4y ago
  There may be no advantage at all to not being able to tolerate. It may simply be there is no longer any advantage to being able to tolerate it, and thus no longer any pressure to select for the trait.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
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.). [1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695 [2] https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2018/07/18/pronghorn-traps-on-the-northern-plains-of-alberta/ https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2018/07/18/pronghorn-trap... [3] https://torbygjordet.com/food/hunting/ https://torbygjordet.com/food/hunting/
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  johnnycomputer knows his anthro. I attest.
RajT88 4y ago
> 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)
a4000 4y ago
The Australian aboriginals in the Sydney area forbade meat during the hot months due to this reason. http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/dharawal.shtml#burran http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/dharawal.shtml#burran

hirundo 4y ago

I enjoy the work of Israeli anthropologist Miki Ben-Dor on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=miki+ben+dor 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 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485

jrootabega 4y ago

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.

wincy 4y ago
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.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  The trick with a dry aged steak is that you don't eat the bits that were directly exposed to the air. The outer layer of the beef protects the inner from the intrusion of all the bacteria and spoilage that makes you sick and that's discarded and you cook the inner stuff that's had time to change but not go bad.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  [dead]
- runnerup 4y ago
  I've eaten a lot of 55-day dry aged steak and it always upsets my stomach a little bit for a day or two. I can consistently count on diarrhea for a bit. Tastes great, though. Too much Wagyu will do something similar, but its not really the same -- in that case its just mostly too much fat/oil. Even a small amount of 30-60 day dry-aged steak will do it to me and it feels different.
throwayyy479087 4y ago
I had very old chicken tikka once and it was exactly what you think. Funky, soft, and juicy. Not good!

1MachineElf 4y ago

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.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
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.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Lebanon bologna is a more commonly available fermented meat in the US. Much better stuff than the pink slime bologna.
fencepost 4y ago
Lactobacillus has been a part of human meat preservation for a long time. https://record.umich.edu/articles/underwater-storage-techniques-preserved-meat-for-early-hunters/ https://record.umich.edu/articles/underwater-storage-techniq...
Zickzack 4y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_fermentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_fermentation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst [3] https://honest-food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/ https://honest-food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/

stefantalpalaru 4y ago

"It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores and omnivores. In the absence of good data on the pH of other hominoids, it is difficult to predict when such an acidic environment evolved. Baboons (_Papio_ spp) have been argued to exhibit the most human–like of feeding and foraging strategies in terms of eclectic omnivory, but their stomachs – while considered generally acidic (pH = 3.7) – do not exhibit the extremely low pH seen in modern humans (pH = 1.5). One explanation for such acidity may be that carrion feeding was more important in humans (and more generally hominin) evolution than currently considered to be the case [...]" - ["The Evolution of Stomach Acidity and Its Relevance to the Human Microbiome" (2015)](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134116 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...)

exfatloss 4y ago

The book The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

jojobas 4y ago
Not just fish and not just Eskimo. Northern tribes rot whole deer, seal and even whale.
- exfatloss 4y ago
  Interesting. But yea, it seems our digestive systems can adapt to it pretty well, given that we've been doing this since long before doctors were around. I suppose the acid kills all the bacteria in the rotten meat unless you're super weak immune wise.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    Not just that, there are toxins lethal to "normal" humans (i.e. cadaverine) that one can adapt to by eating small amounts as a child. Chukchi babies would get ever more rotten bones to suck on (i.e. pacifiers) presumably for that purpose.

dugmartin 4y ago

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.

al2o3cr 4y ago

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.

version_five 4y ago

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.

dabernathy89 4y ago

I can't wait to see all of the influencers who will feel obligated to post TikToks of themselves eating rotten meat now.

mrguyorama 4y ago
You're looking for "high meat" and it's already a thing.
- dabernathy89 4y ago
  Yuck.

precompute 4y ago

Not new, Aajonus Vonderplanitz talked about this for years. https://aajonus.online/ https://aajonus.online/

greenhearth 4y ago

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.

leobg 4y ago
It's probably not that silly, if you consider this: 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.

elhudy 4y ago

>“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.

BigCryo 4y ago

Scavenging explains many of the body traits that humans have.. are good binocular vision allows us to see long distances.. so prehistoric man may have been able to see buzzards surfing over a corpse miles away.. so then we began to ran toward the corpse but we had to run fast so that we could beat the other animals to it.. our skeletal structure allows us to run fast and the fact that we have little hair allows us to sweat and carry off the heat so we can run long distances quickly.. once we get to the corpse there are likely other animal scavenging it such as hyenas, and our ability to grasp rocks and throw them allowed us to throw rocks at the hyenas or whatever and scare them off the corpse.. then if there was even little meat left we could pick up a rock smash the bones and get the marrow out.. this explains how we got good long distance binocular vision, a skeleton that allows us to run, a body that allows us to carry off heat through sweating, hands and other anatomy that can grasp and throw stones, and smash bones to get the marrow out

leobg 4y ago
Also perhaps: hoarding, collecting and doom scrolling.

deleted 4y ago

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ulnarkressty 4y ago

There are quite a lot of videos on YouTube of people eating rotten meat, they claim it 'gets you high'. Perhaps one reason it's considered a delicacy?

bastardoperator 4y ago

I eat rotten meat all the time... in video games, and it hurts you.

purpleblue 4y ago
Blecch! Rotten food! The world spins and goes dark.

mzimbres 4y ago

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?

bufferout 4y ago
vegetarian for 20 years and cooking beef literally smells like dog poop to my nose. So yeah, maybe just a matter of what you're used to?
m0llusk 4y ago
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.
hvis 4y ago
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. Not a biologist, just a layman here.
- rajnathani 4y ago
  > IIUC, the digestive system (and the gut bacteria in it) provide feedback to your taste buds over time. +1. Given the recent research on the gut-brain axis, I too believe that this mechanism is the case.

koliber 4y ago

Fish sauce, dry aged steaks, and bellota ham come to mind. All delicious, and while I’m not sure if you’d call them putrefied meat, it’s not that far off.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
Jamón is about as far away from "putrefied" as you can get; it's cured in salt for weeks and then hung to dry for months or years.
- koliber 4y ago
  There is bacterial action at work to give it that delicious flavor. I don't know where the line is between bacterial breakdown of meat tissue in jamón and putrification. I wanted to highlight that bacterially altered meat is a delicacy today. Maybe people back then people were also looking for umami?

eqefqe 4y ago

I saw people on youtube who eat rotten meat on purpose.

djaychela 4y ago

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.

amriksohata 4y ago

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...

fwlr 4y ago

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.

tracker1 4y ago
Kind of curious how much this may correlate to the fact that we don't dry age meat nearly as much as in times past.
- animal531 4y ago
  Here in South Africa we have a thing called biltong which is basically thick slabs of meat that are cured and marinaded for 24 hours or so, then it's hung up to dry for about a week, depending on the size/dryness that you want. Overall it's a huge industry.
moremetadata 4y ago
Menaquinones are the naturally occurring form of vitamin K identified in bacteria. Different bacteria make different chemicals which can be useful to humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7928036/ 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?

tracker1 4y ago

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.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Or maybe the people who eat trash are the ones that never developed and that’s why they’re still eating trash today.

mromanuk 4y ago

How do they avoided the bad microbes, that can kill you?

bpbp-mango 4y ago
very acidic stomachs I assume > It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores and omnivores. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134116 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

rajnathani 4y ago

Amazing article. 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.

crazygringo 4y ago

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?