Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets • Hacker News Board

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#41

Post by atomicnumber3 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

Connor_Creegan1 wrote: post #20

detuur wrote: post #2

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 t…

>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,…

I suspect that a lot of our tolerance of this stuff in prehistory stems from a combination of:

- spices and seasoning was a lot less common and meat was gamey, not the well-fattened meats we're used to. So this stuff already tasted bland and not amazing as a baseline

- it was preferable to starving, and hunger is the best spice of them all

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#42

Post by dmm » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #24

detuur wrote: post #2

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 t…

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, w…

In her book "The Old Way", Elizabeth Marshall Thomas describes the Kalahari San who she lived with in the 1950s. Despite having bows and arrows some members of that group would persistence hunt.

Dmitriy Lykov(1940-1981) of the Lykov family living an isolated life in Siberia developed a method of persistence hunting, despite or perhaps because of, the absence of any sort of hunting culture in his tiny, isolated group.

Those are just two very recent examples off the top of my head of people persistence hunting for survival. Maybe you're out of your depth on this subject.

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#43

Post by nathanvanfleet » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

detuur wrote: post #2

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 t…

My dog's propensity for diarrhea makes me feel less inclined to state that she has any tolerance for it.

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#44

Post by undersuit » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #29

giraffe_lady wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Boiling for 10 minutes would be better. Pressure Cooking would be best as it can reach the heat/pressure needed to destroy the botulism spores too.

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#45

Post by foobarian » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #35

foobarian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#46

Post by zdragnar » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #43

detuur wrote: post #2

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 t…

My dog's propensity for diarrhea makes me feel less inclined to state that she has any tolerance for it.

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.

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#47

Post by greenhearth » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

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.

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#48

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #29

giraffe_lady wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Here's an example with Staph food poisoning[1]. The bacteria dies when you cook it, but the enterotoxins that Staph generates aren't broken down by heat and remain (section 4). It's good to not consume live Staph, but contaminated food can still cause issues despite cooking.

[1]https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/827965/

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#49

Post by giantrobot » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #15

detuur wrote: post #2

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 t…

> 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.

Dogs have much shorter GI tracts compared to humans. Just that fact means there's less opportunity for bacteria/toxins from rotted food to affect them.

Re: Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets

#50

Post by elhudy » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

>“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.