Prehistory rarely leaves behind anything other than bleached bones, some blunt tools or traces engraved in stone. However, it happens that the cold retains much more than expected, offering the science of the vestiges of an amazing freshness. When Alaska's ice cream reveals a frozen carcass for millennia, then a whole section of our imagination that wakes up, until an unexpected question resurface. What can the tasting of prehistoric meat can be revealed?
Nicknamed Blue Babe because of its bluish skin, the specimen owes its color to vivianitis present in the fabrics. His name also evokes the legendary beef of Paul Bunyan, a figure of North American folklore. The animal was first dated 36,000 years. However, more recent analyzes by the Center for Applied Isotope Studies, quoted by the Museum of the North, have rejected this estimate. He would actually be over 50,000 years old. Remarkable, its muscle tissues, its skin and even its bone marrow remained intact. Their state recalls that of dried beef, a phenomenon rarely observed in the fossil archives.
Marks of teeth and claws visible on the neck of the animal testify to an American Lion attack, an ancestor today disappeared from the Panthera Leo. The extreme conditions of the Alaskian winter allowed the carcass to freeze very quickly after its death, making its conservation remarkable.
When scientists taste history
A few years later, Dale Guthrie, both an experienced researcher and hunter, decided to organize an unusual dinner to celebrate the work of the taxidermist Eirik Granqvist. The event took place in 1984, at his home in Alaska, in the presence of a handful of guests, including the paleontologist Björn Kurtten. On the menu, a stew prepared with a small portion of Blue Babe's neck, where the fabrics had best resisted the passage of time.
Guthrie will tell in an article relayed by Iflscience that meat, although tough, gave off a odor close to beef, mixed with notes of earth and mushroom. The guests added onions, garlic, potatoes and carrots to reduce the possible taste for antiquity. According to the testimonies reported by NPR, the dish did not arouse gastric discomfort, and some have even found the flavor pleasant, despite the thousands of years of freezing.
This unusual feast was not an absolute first. Russian researchers had already tried experience with frozen mammoth flesh, but never in a so well documented setting. The event left a lasting imprint in the memory of the participants, as evidenced by Mary Lee Guthrie who evokes a moment of shared emotion and unprecedented link with human history.
What this prehistoric meat reveals to our relationship to the past
Far from a simple paleontological whim, this meal poses a question that goes beyond scientific curiosity. What pushes researchers to taste prehistoric meat that is old of several tens of millennia? Through this gesture that is both banal and extraordinary, a form of sensory contact is established between two radically different temporalities.
By simmering a piece of Blue Babe in a pot, scientists do not seek so much to eat as to feel, almost physically, the link that unites them to this ancient world. This bison is no longer just an object of study or a museum relic. It becomes the ingredient of an anthropological experience, a bridge between the survival of the Pleistocene hunters and the contemporary concerns of research.
As atlas obscura indicates, this approach finds an echo in the local traditions of Alaska, where wild meats share around collective meals. But it also reveals a modern tension between rigorous scientific analysis and a form of existential nostalgia. Eating a being of the past is to question the moving border between living things, dead, and what we do with their memory.
