Thread: mammoth meat
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Posted to alt.fan.cecil-adams,rec.food.historic
Veronique
 
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Default mammoth meat

Walter Traprock wrote:
> did people use to eat mammoth meat early last century? i've
> just read about being served mammoth meat by the Czar of Russia,
> meat dug up that's been frozen for thousands of years. there was
> no comment on the taste of he meat. book: sea devil's fo'c'sle,
> by lowell thomas (1929). OK, i'll quote all of it relating to mammoth:
>
> "and then there was mammoth's meat. It had been dug up in Siberia
> out of the ice, where it had been kept naturally refrigerated
> for thousands of years. Eating that ancient mammoth's meat is
> more common now, but then it was something new and startling."



In Gary Haynes' "Mammoths, Mastodonts, & Elephants: Biology, Behavior,
and the Fossil Record", he mentions several famous frozen mammoth
finds. In one case, the Beryozvka mammoth, he mentions that
paleontologists Herz & Pfizenmayer excavated it. "...Some parts of the
body were shipped frozen to St. Petersburg...Dogs ate the meat, and
perhaps Herz and Pfizenmayer tasted it, but there was never a
mammoth-meat feast from this carcass..." (This animal was C-14 dated to
between 29,500 and 44,000 years old.)

Haynes suggests that the "dozen or so salvaged remains probably are
poor representations of the actual numbers of preserved carcasses that
continue to be lost as they erode away, rot, or are devoured by animals
and mutilated by ivory hunters." He goes on to write that nearly
complete mammoth carcasses date from two different time intervals:
30,000 - 40,000 years ago, and 13,000 - 10,000years ago, with skeletons
lacking preserved soft tissue found in intervening times. This may be
because the times of better preservation had more water available to
supply mud flows, which covered the carcasses.

The reference to Herz and Pfizenmayer "tasting" the meat is the only
modern-day edibility reference Haynes gives, but given his observation
that most of the preserved mammoths had an obvious cause of death, plus
the preservation not only by freezing but by mud-flows (eg, it's not
like the carcasses were quick-frozen, like a modern chicken), implies
to me that for anyone happening upon a mammoth thawing out of a cliff,
the first thought wasn't "yum!" ("Get the tusks!", more likely.)


V.
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Veronique Chez Sheep