My dad and I were discussing how long meat kept in the freezer remains safe for consumption. He mentioned that an organization called the Explorers Club had thawed out a prehistoric woolly mammoth, cooked it, and eaten it. This seemed dubious at best to me, so I thought I’d ask that great font of wisdom, Unca Cece. Has anyone in modern times ever eaten a preserved piece of prehistory? –Garth Lewis, via e-mail
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Old-time paleontology lore is full of tales in which half-starved explorers or hunters defrost an icebound mammoth carcass, but most of these are impossible to verify and sound far-fetched at best. In a fairly skeptical-seeming 1872 item the New York Times passed along a report from some French adventurers trying for the North Pole who claimed to have found in Russia so many well-preserved mammoth specimens that for a time they “lived entirely on mammoth meat, broiled, roasted and baked.” The nature novelist James Oliver Curwood, who traveled extensively in northwestern Canada, told the Chicago Tribune in 1912 about dining with Indians who’d happened upon a frozen mastodon (not the same as a mammoth, but close enough for our purposes); he described his steak’s color as “deep red or mahogany” and its flavor (somewhat unimaginatively, I’d say) as “old and dry.” Accounts once flourished of “mammoth banquets” held in Saint Petersburg and Paris, but most sources now consider these apocryphal.
Even when mammoth meat isn’t actually putrid, it still doesn’t make great eating. According to Richard Stone’s book Mammoth (2001), Russian zoologist Alexei Tikhonov (who figures in articles about the recent Siberian find) once tried a bite and said “it was awful. It tasted like meat left too long in a freezer.”
