Russian paleontologists have pieced together the story of mammoth hunt but studying the long-dead beast’s bones:
He was around 15 years old and in good shape but not as wily as an older bull. The humans surrounding him were smaller but much smarter and better armed.
Spears breached his rib cage in several places, sinking through skin and muscle, scoring the bone on their way to vital organs. Three pierced his left scapula, at the height of a human shoulder, entering hard on a downward path after they were thrown. The spears were seeking his heart, and the men throwing them would make the tosses of a first-rate quarterback look weak and sloppy.
The last of their talents was to finish off the goliath after he fell at their feet, still full of rage and strength. One of them thrust a bone- or ivory-pointed spear into the mammoth’s cheek. He would not have been aiming there but at the arteries feeding the trunk, as modern elephant hunters, like the foragers of the African tropical forest, still do. Surprisingly, the point did not break off.
How do we know all of this? Because the Russian scientists deployed tools of their own—CT scans to peer into bones and organs, radiocarbon dating to establish the time frame, stratigraphy to analyze and order the soil and rock layers where the fossils were found—in that same clever old human way. Like their prehistoric forbears, they reasoned through the problem, developed a strategy and cooperated to nab their quarry.
The men got all they could from the beast. Damage to a tusk shows that they sliced from it slim, sharp knives and scraping tools of the hardest ivory. Other evidence suggests that the men took the tongue as a delicacy or for some ritual, though they left the penis behind.
Why would taking the tongue be worth commenting on? It’s great food. In a society with traditional tastes (like the one around us) it is still eaten often. There’s usually a waiting list for the tongue for our beef sales, so it seems reasonable that mammoth tongue would also be valuable.
Cooking tongue takes a long time and demands moist heat. That means not just a lot of firewood, probably hard to come by on the tundra, but some sort of large, hard to move crock that has low heat transference, needing even more fuel to keep hot. The resources required to cook a pound of tongue would cook many pounds meat via roasting over direct fire. Although that meat would be tough …
Organ meats, which can be cooked quickly via direct heat or on heated slabs of rock, have high caloric value, and are soft after cooking, would be most highly prized.
These are hungry folk. They just killed a mammoth. In times of scarcity, they’ll eat anything with food value. If the tongue has gone why would it be for some ritual? It’s just food.
If you slice tongue into half inch strips it can be grilled over open flame and is totally edible (and tasty). People like to over complicate things.
Who doesn’t like some tongue?
Because of all of you I bought German tongue sausage earlier today, and pretended to be a caveman for the duration of my lunch break, while eating something resembling this bun.
You don’t burp after eating that, you grunt! I bet you can’t wait for German retailer Aldi to come around now…
But the most primitive thing I ever ate remains shark fillet, from an Italian retailer. You just can’t pass on shark as a man!
If you pass on shark meat, you may just as well leave your ballz next to it in the fridge; that’s why I had to buy it.
I had shirako once — raw fish testicles, seed sacks, whatever they were. That seemed primitive at the time; now it just seems a bit dumb. But, hey, at least I won the “who can eat the most extreme sushi” contest with my buddy.