Nowadays, almost every food we eat has been preserved in some way - whether it’s a refrigerated bag of spinach, a package of ramen, or a bag of beef jerky. In contrast, our early ancestors had to rely on plants and animals that were currently available. This simple hunter-gatherer system promises times of hunger when food is scarce. However, one recent study has found evidence of early Paleolithic people saving animal bones for up to nine weeks before eating them around 420,000 to 200,000 years ago at Qesem cave near Tel Aviv [1]. These animal bones were saved for their valuable interiors: bone marrow, an important source of nutrition in a compact high-fat, high-calorie package.
In more recent times, bone marrow has been an important source of nutrition in the winter months for the Nunmiut Eskimo or processed from bison to make pemmican among Great Plains groups [1]. Within Qesem cave, the limbs and skulls of hunted animal carcasses, most commonly the fallow deer, were taken into the cave and saved while the rest of the carcass was processed on-site [1]. Archaeologists are able to distinguish the bones that were eaten immediately versus preserved by examining incision marks on the bones [1]. Here, the marrow-rich metapodials, one of the leg bones, were found with unique chopping marks that indicate that the marrow was consumed after it had been preserved. Additionally, these bones were likely stored with the skin still on in order to improve preservation. To further test this theory, archaeologists experimented on the preservation of bone marrow, finding that preserving bone with the skin in similar environmental conditions was feasible for up to nine weeks [1]. In this way, the bones represent “cans” that preserve the marrow for long periods of time.
This changes our current understandings of hunter-gatherer practices: instead of early people living off whatever they caught that day and enduring periods of hunger when times were scarce, they had sophisticated systems of food storage and planning. As Professor Gopher, one of the archaeologists on the project, explained, evidence of these “food cans” indicate that prehistoric humans were “sophisticated enough, intelligent enough, and talented enough” to preserve these bones under specific conditions in order to plan for a food-scarce future [2]. This evidence of food-planning further represents an increasingly complex socioeconomic system as early humans adapted to their environments. So, when you pull out a bag of beef jerky or a can of corn from the cupboard, remember that our early ancestors were doing something very similar with a cache of bones.
References
Blasco, R.; Rosell, J.; Arilla, M.;, Margalida, A.; Villalba, D.; Gopher, A.; Barkai, R. Bone Marrow Storage and Delayed Consumption at Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave, Israel (420 to 200 ka). Science Advances. 2019, Vol. 5, no. 10.
ScienceDaily. Prehistoric humans ate bone marrow like canned soup 400,000 years ago: Bone and skin preserved the nutritious marrow for later consumption. ScienceDaily. 2019. Retrieved 13 October 2019, from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191009142902.htm
Image: Cans Vectors by Vecteezy from https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/cans