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Eating Mammoth

Swifty

Swifty

doesn't negotiate with terriers
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Sep 15, 2013
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I'm sorry if this is in the wrong part of the forum?. I've been trying to find an old (1890's?)photograph supposedly showing a load of aristocrat looking types sat inside a large dinosaur's rib cage and dining on thawed out Wooly Mammoth steaks. This is the most credible sounding link I've found so far. I first saw the specific picture in a book that I remember was said to have been taken in a London museum? .. thanks.

msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ulti ... 000708;p=0
Link is dead. No archived version found.
 
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Thank you Urvogel but I don't think that's the same one. I haven't seen yours before though .. brilliant stuff!
 
Mammoth meat was allegedly offered as an appetizer at the 1951 Explorers Club dinner in NYC.
 
I remember reading an account of explorers digging up a frozen mammoth, and as it thawed out, the hungry huskies ate quite a large amount of mammoth meat.
Can't remember where I read it.
 
Armstrong and Miller fans will remember their cavemen sketches, which frequently referred to mammoth eating. No doubt some are available on YouTube, for those with the time and inclination to search... ;)
 
I first read that Csar Nicholas and some of the scientific members of an expedition found a Mammoth so well preserved that they celebrated by eating the meat. Later, in another source it was reported that that story was wrong; that it only reported the meat, "looked" like it could be eaten. I seriously doubt any people of modern times have ever actually eaten Mammoth. Talk about gastric distress. Meat frozen solid in a modern freezer loses its flavor and appearance after only a few months. Can you imagine 10,000 years? Dogs, especially wolves are not picky eaters and can actually eat half rotten meat without due distress. So it is possible that sled dogs may have eaten the Mammoth.
 
This is no help with tne original question, but the trope of wealthy people eating the remains of an extinct or endangered species was nicely subverted in an episode of Northern Exposure. The sophisticated New Yorker is thrilled by the scientific potential of a wooly mammoth find, only to discover the local Alaskans just consider it good eatin'.
:)
 
Brig said:
I first read that Csar Nicholas and some of the scientific members of an expedition found a Mammoth so well preserved that they celebrated by eating the meat. Later, in another source it was reported that that story was wrong; that it only reported the meat, "looked" like it could be eaten. I seriously doubt any people of modern times have ever actually eaten Mammoth. Talk about gastric distress. Meat frozen solid in a modern freezer loses its flavor and appearance after only a few months. Can you imagine 10,000 years?
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Solzhenitsyn opens GULAG Archipelago with a reference to a scholarly article he read after his own release from the camps. IIRC it was written by a paleontologist whose expedition discovered some prehistoric salamanders preserved in the permafrost, that were thawed and enthusiastically eaten by members of the expedition. It was that enthusiasm that tipped him off to the presence of camp inmates on the expedition (used as forced labour). Who else, for the reasons @Brig states, would be enthusiastic about eating ancient amphibian, other than starving zeks? Yes, it's not precisely mammoth, but the principle is the same.
 
Ulalume said:
This is no help with tne original question, but the trope of wealthy people eating the remains of an extinct or endangered species was nicely subverted in an episode of Northern Exposure. The sophisticated New Yorker is thrilled by the scientific potential of a wooly mammoth find, only to discover the local Alaskans just consider it good eatin'.
:)
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I saw that episode. Naturally it was "soap opera" fiction. Had it been true the show would have been cancelled due to loss off most of its actors. Unfortunately I live in an area where that could happen. BTW just happened upon that site and answered the question. I have no idea what the original question was. I have been following the Mammoth stories for some time now. Though I do not believe that humans were responsible for the Mammoth extinction, we may have helped it along. So I think it is up to us to bring back the Mammoth if possible and the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacine) as well. We were definitely responsible for its extinction.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I remember reading an account of explorers digging up a frozen mammoth, and as it thawed out, the hungry huskies ate quite a large amount of mammoth meat.
Can't remember where I read it.
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National Geographic......not sure of month or year. I read the same thing.
 
Of course, a much-more potentially Fortean perspective (almost, one might say, the elephant in the room) is the perspective that some of these mammoths may be considerably-fresher than others.

I'm sure there's been reports in FT, and elsewhere, of Saami and Steppes tribespeople reporting semi-contemporary sightings of woolly mammoths (though this may be examples of visions, oral history traditions, fictional stories reinforced by revealed corpses, group memory, or Something Else).

And....here's a very Fortean frozen fancy. More than a bit B-movie, but, so be it.

Mammoth: blast-frozen, say 15,000 years ago. In an instantantaneous, almost Pompeii-style fashion, mid-chew. It's throwback mammallian diving/hibernation reflex reacts massively (coupled with some other variable). Let's say a Very Long Time passes (not being specific, here) but somehow, it's there. Not now, but then, a Then much closer to now than otherwise was the case. And the mammoth isn't just fresh enough to eat...it's fresh enough to fear.

Like those entombed toads found inside geodes or flint crennels....interesting story. Probably impossible. But perhaps impossible to say definitely not, at all.
 
We'll never find out, because they're all buried. If one does wake from suspended animation, it'd die of suffocation.
 
Ermintrude said:
Of course, a much-more potentially Fortean perspective (almost, one might say, the elephant in the room) is the perspective that some of these mammoths may be considerably-fresher than others.

I'm sure there's been reports in FT, and elsewhere, of Saami and Steppes tribespeople reporting semi-contemporary sightings of woolly mammoths (though this may be examples of visions, oral history traditions, fictional stories reinforced by revealed corpses, group memory, or Something Else).

And....here's a very Fortean frozen fancy. More than a bit B-movie, but, so be it.

Mammoth: blast-frozen, say 15,000 years ago. In an instantantaneous, almost Pompeii-style fashion, mid-chew. It's throwback mammallian diving/hibernation reflex reacts massively (coupled with some other variable). Let's say a Very Long Time passes (not being specific, here) but somehow, it's there. Not now, but then, a Then much closer to now than otherwise was the case. And the mammoth isn't just fresh enough to eat...it's fresh enough to fear.

Like those entombed toads found inside geodes or flint crennels....interesting story. Probably impossible. But perhaps impossible to say definitely not, at all.
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I'll never say never. But seems unlikely. yet we know a small variety of mammoth continued to exist on Wangel island off the cast of Alaska until about 2600 years ago. On the other hand steaks kept frozen in my home freezer are worthless in lssthan one year. much less, 2500.
 
I don't think they would have made for good table fare. But the case of the Wrangle Island mammoth's is quite interesting. The apparently got cutoff by the rising waters at the end of the last ice age and a rather healthy population continued to thrive on Wrangle Island for as long as 7 thousand years after their forebears went extinct.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17457561
 
It was the isolation on Wrangle island that resulted in their smaller size. Six foot at the shoulder, if I remember correctly.
 
Brig said:
It was the isolation on Wrangle island that resulted in their smaller size. Six foot at the shoulder, if I remember correctly.
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That's quite a reduction as a full grown male from the mainland was 9' to 11' at the shoulder at ~ 6 tons.
 
@Brig Note the nominative paradoxy that such a creature (a mini mammoth) would figuratively be a tiny giant, a small-big. A hairy half-heffalump....
 
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I can remember reading in a Fortean type book ages ago about a dinner party that was held (I think?) in The Natural History Museum sometime in the late eighteen hundreds where 'they' all got to eat mammoth steak meals but as an added thrill (if you will), this was on a constructed stage with the mammoth's rib cage used as an awning. Does that report sound familiar to anyone please? ..
 
Swifty said:
I can remember reading in a Fortean type book ages ago about a dinner party that was held (I think?) in The Natural History Museum sometime in the late eighteen hundreds where 'they' all got to eat mammoth steak meals but as an added thrill (if you will), this was on a constructed stage with the mammoth's rib cage used as an awning. Does that report sound familiar to anyone please? ..
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I really can't imagine any mammoth meat being fit for human consumption, even if it had never thawed out.
It'd also be riddled with dead parasites.
 
Krepostnoi said:
And in a strong contender for the coincidence thread, what with this topic recently emerging here, it turns out the Explorers were actually eating 'sea turtle'. That name is surely tautological, if not turtological.
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Since the link in post #25 doesn't seem to work, here's a link to the NY Times article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/science/explorers-club-mammoth-dinner.html

I noticed something about this article and others in the 'popular press'. At face value, they don't rule out the possibility that the turtle meat hoax was limited to the sample tested (sent to an Explorers Club member and museum curator who'd missed the fabled dinner).

This illustrates the sort of lacunae / openings we've seen exploited by diehard speculators to either persist in promoting the fantastic or even creating new offshoots in a number of Fortean subject areas.

However ... If you go back to the original article from the Yale researchers:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146825

... you'll find that they indeed invested effort in attempting to cover all the conceivable angles. The data supporting their conclusion the whole dinner menu was a hoax is not (or at least only partially) cited in all the 'popular' accounts I've seen so far.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I really can't imagine any mammoth meat being fit for human consumption, even if it had never thawed out.
It'd also be riddled with dead parasites.
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Not if you get it from Sainsburys. Their grain-free, free range, organic mammoth is very good you know.
 
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