Lots of "diet and cuisine" topics this week, more coming in a few.
Posted on 04/13/2023 8:20:29 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...when did humans start eating snails? Well, researchers have recently discovered the earliest evidence of prehistoric people cooking and eating these terrestrial mollusks. But while you might imagine a rustic version of modern escargot, the snails in question were actually enormous in comparison.
A team of researchers from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, have found shell fragments of land snails from the Achatinidae family – which can grow to 16 centimeters (6.3 inches) long – at Border Cave, located on a cliff near South Africa's border with Eswatini. The site has been excavated on multiple occasions since the 1930s, but it was during work conducted between 2015 and 2019 that the shell fragments of giant land snails were found.
The shell bits, recovered in relative abundance, appeared in multiple layers of sediment dating from 70,000 to 170,000 years ago. They also come in a range of colors... which occurs when the shell is heated...
Other research has shown that snail consumption appears in dig sites dated to about 30,000 years ago in Europe and around 40,000 years ago in Africa. This represents a "huge gap" for the study's findings, study author Marine Wojcieszak told New Scientist...
Given that hominins have been using fire for at least 400,000 years, it is easy to see how the latest finds fall within the realm of possibility. In fact, there is evidence that we were baking fish over 780,000 years ago.
To test their hypothesis that the snails were on site due to human consumption, the team took shells from modern land snails and broke them into fragments. The fragments were of different sizes and colors and were experimentally heated for periods of time between 5 minutes to 36 hours.
(Excerpt) Read more at iflscience.com ...
Lots of "diet and cuisine" topics this week, more coming in a few.
So, the French people are a lot older than I thought...............
Enough butter and garlic...
Would you like them rare or well done, Monsieur ?.............
Is that really his name?
And they would still taste like buttery garlicky rubber.
'Face
;o]
Interesting, but do we really need to know this? Aren’t there more important issues to focus on?
Frogs have been eating snails for a long long time.
They call it “escargot” to make it sound high toned.
Still snails though.
What?
Whether or not they had Creme Brulee or Souffles for dessert, afterward?
.
But the pertinent question is - Do (did) they taste better than octopus?
41 years ago I ate octopus for the first (and last) time at a Greek restaurant
on South Street in Philadelphia.
They were Very bad.
Multiple people have told me that: 'They must have been cooked incorrectly.'.
I counter with: 'The mistake was cooking and serving them AT ALL.'.
You stated snails were like: 'garlicky rubber'.
Octopus gave the impression of pencil erasers.
I have no desire to research this matter any further...
Humans also ate a lot of insects and insect larvae. That’s how we probably became meat-eaters in the first place. In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey proto-humans just started eating pigs one day. That’s not how it works. If your digestive system isn’t geared for meat-eating, you can’t digest it.
Reason #1 why that branch went extinct.
So much easier to catch when they can’t run.
Cote d'Ivoire Giant Land Snail Stew:
I'd try either.
George: No, no, Hey I’ll get it. What’s in the BIG salad?
Jerry: Big lettuce, big carrots, giant land snails, tomatoes like volleyballs.
I am not surprised that early humans ate whatever food was available.
I am a bit surprised that early humans were “cooking” their food
170,000 years ago.
Lol…. Mythical nonsense.
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