Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. You can read the rest of this chapter from Lenore Newman’s Lost Feast here.Įxcerpted in part from Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food by Lenore Newman © by Lenore Newman. We needed a new way of interacting with the environment. Our numbers contracted and our territories shrank. The loss of the mammoth and similar animals left us with a problem: without megafauna, humans were hungrier and weaker. As the sea level rose, their habitat shrank until, eventually, the environment couldn’t support them. These mammoths were never hunted but encountered a different problem: climate change. On the remote Wrangel Island north of Alaska, a site that humans never colonized, the final pygmy mammoths vanished about 1650 BCE. By 10,000 years ago, they were gone from the continents. The last species of the genus was the woolly mammoth, and these animals began to die off as humans followed the retreat of the glaciers. Once early humans got a taste of caramelized mammoth with wild thyme, they were likely hooked. One reason for this is known as the Maillard reaction, in which sugars and amino acids react to produce compounds that make seared foods tasty. Early humans didn’t know that, of course, but they did know that cooked meat tasted better. Cooking causes meat to lose calories as the fat melts out, but it is easier to digest, reducing the caloric cost of digestion by as much as 15% and giving humans another critical edge. Today’s barbecue techniques have a very long pedigree.Īn early human site in the Ukraine revealed a diet rich in plants and mammoth and signs of frequent cooking. It is unlikely our mammoth chefs had much salt, but from dental plaque studies, we know the mammoth hunters ate herbs, and so perhaps they prepared a crushed herbal rub to massage into the meat. The fat would run over the meat and could be collected in shells at the bottom of the sticks. The people of the Pacific coast of North America roasted salmon in thin strips by wrapping them around wooden sticks and planks and propping the planks near a fire, a technique that would work for mammoth as well. We had sharp stone knives and probably cut meat into chunks or strips to roast over or alongside the fire. We had controlled fires a million years ago, though cooking pots didn’t develop until 20,000 years ago, and our mammoth snacking days fall somewhat in between. It is hard to say with certainty how we cooked mammoth, but archeologists can give us a rough idea. Mammoths dominate the art, suggesting their great importance. The artists engraved lines into the rock and filled areas with pigment. Some are depicted at a run, galloping across the walls. Its location deep underground has protected the cave from light and the elements, giving us a good idea of the look and color of the live animals.
Paintings of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, horses, bison, and other animals adorn the ceiling. Oxygen levels are low and ancient artists would have been working by the flickering light of wicks floating in burning oil. To get to the farthest decorated chamber is a 45-minute walk underground. Rouffignac cave in France, known as the cave of the hundred mammoths, is a good example.
Some ancient cave complexes were both shelters and the first places of worship.
We also know about mammoths from ancient cave art.
From such hunting, we developed the first really critical culinary skill after fire: leftovers. Later, the earliest food technologies-smoking, drying and salting-emerged to protect similar meaty bounties. Archeological evidence suggests humans weighted mammoth meat and submerged it in cool ponds, where it would stay somewhat fresh. As no group of humans could consume so much meat while it was fresh, there would have been a need to preserve some of the kill for a later time. Such a bounty likely spurred the invention of an entirely new technology. A quick blow with a poisoned arrow or spear would do the rest, as they had weak points on their belly and neck. Mammoths might seem fierce but were likely easy to sneak up on. (Climate change, on the other hand, would have had the opposite effect.) In some areas, we have found shelters built with mammoth tusks and bones, suggesting mass killing over a sustained period. Studies of tusk show that when humans entered a herd’s territory, sexual maturity of female mammoths began happening earlier, a sign of predation we see today in stressed animal populations. We can’t entirely know how quickly early humans eliminated mammoths once they entered an area, but we can glean clues from what we know of the mammoth’s habits and breeding.
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