"In a landscape known for its history of prodigious bison hunting, researchers have uncovered traces of a unique aspect of native hunting tradition — a camp dedicated to making the dried meat-and-fat product known as pemmican." Source: Western Digs (2017)
"The camp is just part of a large bison-hunting site in north-central Montana called Kutoyis, which includes more than 3,500 stone features dating from to the 14th to 17th centuries, a heyday for bison hunting among the ancestors of the modern Blackfoot peoples."
Comment: Pemmican was invented by the Metis tribe in Canada, according to various sources I've seen (I'm not sure how that was determined). The Metis trace their descent to the First Nations peoples, so it's possible that the paleo-indians learned how to make pemmican when they first encountered the bison in the New World. This is all pure speculation, though.
The technique of curing meat with smoke goes back to the Stone Age. For example, the Siberian Times in 2015 reported that archaeologists had discovered a 5,000-year-old smokehouse used for preserving fish:
"Fish was processed by putting it in pits in the red-coloured ground to give it a 'special smell'. The smokehouse was uncovered at Tartas-1 site in Vengerovo district [Siberia?] where experts have been studying burials and other ritual facilities for over 10 years."
"We got more than we deserve and we don't appreciate what we got."
"Several sources describe the salting of meat in the ancient Mediterranean world. Diodore of Sicily in his Bibliotheca historica wrote that the Cosséens in the mountains of Persia salted the flesh of carnivorous animals. Strabo indicates that people at Borsippa were catching bats and salting them to eat. The ancient Greeks prepared tarichos ... which was meat and fish conserved by salt or other means. The Romans called this dish salsamentum – which term later included salted fat, the sauces and spices used for its preparation ... Preserved meats were furthermore a part of religious traditions: resulting meat for offerings to the gods was salted before being given to priests, after which it could be picked up again by the offerer, or even sold in the butcher's."
"Meat was a luxury for most people [in ancient Greece and Rome]," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. "In classical Athens it was generally eaten only at feasts accompanying religious festivals. Poultry, game, and eggs played a large part in Roman cookery, but there was comparatively little butcher's meat, apart from pork and sometimes veal. Peasants generally kept pigs. Wild birds (partridges, quails, pheasants) were also eaten. The soldiers of the Roman army had a higher standard of living and a more varied diet than the bulk of the population of the Roman empire."
For Stone Age people, butchering and curing the meat from large game animals like mammoths must have been a major communal activity:
"Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large. The largest known species reached heights in the region of 4 m (13.1 ft) at the shoulder and weights of up to 8 tonnes (8.8 short tons), while exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes (13.2 short tons)." (Wikipedia) Even normal-sized mammoths probably weighed around five tons.
Neolithic hunters did it, though, using little more than stone tools. I imagine a full-grown mammoth could probably feed a group of hunter-gatherers for a long time.
The Cairnes archaeological dig on South Ronaldsay island in the Orkneys (2016).
"About 1,700 years ago, Iron Age cooks served a massive, meaty feast along the Scottish coast of the North Sea, offering guests a spectacular view as they chowed down on sheep, pig and otter, and even received party favors — metal rings and brooches to wear, archaeologists report." Source: Live Science.
"Researchers made the discovery when they found the aftermath of the feast — a trash heap filled with about 11,000 fragments of animal bone. They also uncovered metalwork supplies from the same time period."
Note: "Archaeologists made the finding while they were excavating The Cairns, an archaeological site in South Ronaldsay, one of the Orkney Islands, which sit off the northern coast of Scotland." (Live Science) I'm not sure if the 2016 video above shows the dig where this particular trash heap was discovered. There are prehistoric cairnes all over the Orkney islands.
Notes: "Grisly evidence has been uncovered by researchers that Neanderthals butchered their own kind some 40,000 years ago, opening up many possibilities regarding the way late Neanderthals dealt with their dead in this last period before they died out." Source: Science Daily (2016).
Archaeologists have been uncovering evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism for years. Back in 2006, for instance, Live Science reported that "Neanderthals suffered periods of starvation and may have supplemented their diet through cannibalism, according to a study of remains from northwest Spain." At the time, further evidence had also been discovered at other sites in Europe, according to paleobiologists who said that cannibalism "was general among Neanderthal populations,"
In 2013, the Independent reported the discovery of "the remains of a group of Neanderthals in northern Spain who were butchered and eaten by a group of local cannibals." According to this report, which may have been a follow-up to the earlier discovery in Spain, the Neanderthals "butchered their rivals, breaking open their skulls and bones to extract the marrow," apparently eating them raw. The bones were found back in 1994.
The extinction of the Neanderthals is still a mystery, but one theory says that they were hunted, killed and eaten by the humans who eventually replaced them. This idea is based on the discovery of a Neanderthal jawbone which was "apparently butchered by modern humans," according to the Guardian (2009). The researcher responsible for the theory argued that the bone "provides crucial evidence that humans attacked Neanderthals, and sometimes killed them, bringing back their bodies to caves to eat or to use their skulls or teeth as trophies."
This theory has been widely dismissed, however. According to Live Science (2013), "no clear evidence suggests modern humans ate Neanderthals, much less that they did so enough to drive Neanderthals to extinction, despite recent claims from scientists in Spain." From what I can tell, most researchers currently believe that the Neanderthals vanished due to natural causes rather than some kind of prehistoric genocide. The evidence for Neanderthal cannibalism seems to be pretty clear, though, and I find it hard to believe that early humans didn't occasionally practice it themselves.
"Archaeologists recently uncovered ancient storage rooms in a 2,000-year-old winery, at a site in Egypt's Nile Delta to the north of Cairo." Source: Live Science (Jan. 2019).
"Inside these rooms — which appeared to be climate-controlled for keeping wine — archaeologists also found coins, pots used in winemaking and other pottery objects, said officials with the Ministry of Antiquities for the Arab Republic of Egypt ..."
Note: "Wine played an important role in ancient Egyptian ceremonial life. A thriving royal winemaking industry was established in the Nile Delta following the introduction of grape cultivation from the Levant to Egypt c. 3000 BC. The industry was most likely the result of trade between Egypt and Canaan during the early Bronze Age, commencing from at least the 27th-century BC Third Dynasty, the beginning of the Old Kingdom period. Winemaking scenes on tomb walls, and the offering lists that accompanied them, included wine that was definitely produced in the delta vineyards. By the end of the Old Kingdom, five distinct wines, probably all produced in the Delta, constituted a canonical set of provisions for the afterlife." (Wikipedia)
People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."
Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."
Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.
"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.
Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)
"One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland." Source: Live Science.
"However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said."
Note: The bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, one of several caves in Ojcow National Park in Poland, are "the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland." The bird that ate the child's bones isn't identified, which is too bad. I've got this picture of a Neanderthal kid wandering off from its cave and getting gobbled up by a huge terror bird, but the terror birds, unfortunately, lived in South America during a different time period.
"Sifting through preserved poop from a medieval port city in Germany, scientists discovered that the town's inhabitants were riddled with tapeworms." Source: Live Science.
"The discovery also revealed a fascinating hidden record of dietary changes during that period, according to a new study."
Note: "Intestinal parasites such as tapeworms and roundworms were common in Europe before the advent of modern sanitation," according to Nature. "Adrian Smith at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues extracted DNA from parasite eggs in soil samples from graveyards and former latrines. The samples, collected from archaeological sites in what are now the United Kingdom, Germany, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, ranged from 350 to 5,600 years old."
Notes: "The alcoholic beverage of choice for both the ancient Greeks and Romans was wine, customarily distilled with water, except perhaps in the case of the Macedonians who were reputed to drink their wine akratos, or unmixed. Distilled spirits, such as brandy and whisky, had not yet been invented, and beer was looked upon as a swinish potation better left to barbarians." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised).
Both the Greeks and Romans were aware of the destructive effects of excessive drinking and chronic intoxication, according to the OCD. "In the Odyssey, Homer makes a speaker note that wine is a bane to those who drink it excessively and identifies overindulgence as the cause of the Centaur Eurytion's vile behavior. In Hades, Homer's Elpenor admits that heavy drinking was a key factor in his fatal plunge from Circe's roof."
There were actually two centaurs named Eurytion and they were both lushes who came to bad ends after making violent threats and lusting after human females. As for Elpenor, he was one of Odysseus's companions on the island of Circe. He got plastered and decided to spend the night on Circe's roof, only to fall off in a drunken stupor and break his neck.
The Romans were familiar with alcoholism as well. "In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius writes that wine's fury disturbs the soul, debilitates the body and provokes quarrels. The younger Seneca warns that habitual drunkenness so weakens the mind that its consequences are felt long after the drinking has stopped. He notes that some men become so tolerant of wine that even though they are inebriated they appear to be sober." (OCD)
According to the OCD, several famous Romans were accused of being drunks. They include Sulla, Cato, Mark Antony (no surprise there), Cicero's son, Augustus' daughter, Julia, "and the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Vitellius and Commodus."
As noted above, beer was known as the "Barbarian's Beverage" in the ancient world, but the stuff the barbarians swilled didn't have much in common with the distilled beers we have today:
"We know of ancient European beverages combining various fruits, or fruits and honey, fruits and cereals, honey and cereals, or even fruits, honey, and cereals. Furthermore, numerous types of plants, spices and other substances (such as narcotic drugs) could be added to the beverage before or after fermentation." Source: The Barbarian's Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe, by Max Nelson (PDF). This book is also available on Amazon.
The history of guzzling and overindulging in various fermented drinks probably goes all the way back to the Stone Age. It appears to be a natural human impulse. Even Conan the Barbarian couldn't resist the urge to get hammered after a long day fighting wizards and smashing heads.
Note: This entire lecture series should play automatically, but if it doesn't, the rest of the series can be found here.
"For all of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome, the Roman economy never developed into anything terribly complex compared to modern economies. Ancient Rome was an agrarian and slave based economy whose main concern was feeding the vast number of citizens and legionaries who populated the Mediterranean region. Agriculture and trade dominated Roman economic fortunes, only supplemented by small scale industrial production." Source: "Ancient Roman Economy," United Nations of Roma Victrix.
According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), "The growth of Rome to a city of perhaps 250,000 in the time of the Gracchi and of up to one million under Augustus, far outstripping the productive capacity of her hinterlands, created an unprecedented demand for imported foodstuffs." The regular distribution of "a set monthly ration of grain at a set price for adult male citizen residents" was established by the populari Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, later assassinated for his reforms, and the ration was made free by P. Clodius Pulcher in 58 BC.
The Gracchi brothers were representatives of the lower class who attempted to make reforms benefiting the common people. Both were murdered by the ruling aristocracy for (among other things) their land reforms which would have had a big impact on the patrician's power and incomes. This conflict between the commoners and the rapacious nobility still continues to this day.
The emperor Augustus stabilized the number of residents entitled to the grain dole "at or below 200,000" in 2 BC. "[The] public supply, drawing on the grain paid to the state as rent or tax in Sicily, Africa and (from 30 BC) Egypt, helped the privileged minority who held tickets of entitlement, which could be inherited or sold. But the monthly ration did not meet a family's need for grain, and the tickets did not necessarily go to the poor." (OCD)
Sounds a lot like our modern welfare system. In later years, this public dole, combined with the construction of the new Colosseum, led to the development of the "bread and circuses" system for controlling (or trying to control) the population of Rome and made the grain supply of Egypt critical to the survival of the city.
Even the state couldn't meet the huge demand for grain in a city the size of Rome, however, and this created all sorts of problems. "State grain met no more than a portion of the city's annual grain needs," according to the OCD ('Trade, Roman,' p. 1537). "The rest had to be supplied by the free market. Furthermore, the importation of the state grain depended upon private traders, who in times of crisis had to be offered considerable incentives to involve themselves in the trade."