Up in the chilly Arctic, the frozen bodies of woolly mammoths can be so well preserved that they still have blood in their veins. With their flesh still pink, it is no wonder why some people have thought of eating meat frozen for 35,000 years. In fact, there have been tales of dining on woolly mammoths frozen since the Ice Age, which range from the fantastical to the truer and grosser. Let’s begin with the fantastical ones.
In 1901, a male mammoth was discovered by an expedition to the Beresovka River in Siberia. The mammoth was so excellently preserved that it still had grass in its mouth.
The mammoth’s bones and skin were put on display in St. Petersburg, and its flesh was, supposedly, served at a “mammoth banquet.” The meal was a hit, according to one glowing account, ”particularly the course of mammoth steak, which all the learned guests declared was agreeable to the taste, and not much tougher than some of the sirloin furnished by butchers of today.”
Fifty years later, in 1951, an exotic feast was put up by the Explorers Club in New York. This time, it was said that the meat came from a carcass found in the Aleutian Islands, according to a Jesuit-turned-geologist known as the Glacier Priest.
Each diner got mere slivers of meat, but those slivers made quite the impression. Guests went home bragging of their Ice Age dinner. But they later disagreed over whether the meat was really supposed to be mammoth or mastodon or an extinct giant sloth called megatherium.
DNA analysis say otherwise, however. The meat from the 1951 feast was none of the above mentioned. It wasn’t even prehistoric.
What was the meat from the 1951 feast? And what about the account of the “mammoth banquet” of 1901? What happens to meat frozen for tens of thousands of years? Answers over at The Atlantic.
(Image Credit: Dmitry Bogdanov/ Wikimedia Commons)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began The Gulag Archipelago with one of the most searing passages in literature:
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream — and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.
Few readers of that science journal, Solzhenitsyn observed, would have understood what sort of people rush to eat prehistoric creatures. But he and his friends had understood immediately, for they, too, had been zeks, the half-starved prisoners of the network of hundreds of forced labor camps spread across the world’s largest country like a string of islands. Each of those islands had been governed by the Soviet Union’s “Main Camp Administration,” whose Russian acronym was GULAG.
But the linked article is paywalled, and I can't even read it.