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?