The Oldest Preserved Meat Eaten By Humans Was 50,000 Years In The Making

Imagine getting invited to a dinner party and finding out that the food being served is preserved meat? Sure, this doesn't sound bad considering most of our beloved deli meats are processed to have a longer shelf life than raw meat, but what if we told you the meat displayed at the dinner table during this gathering would be 50,000 years old? Sounds totally bizarre. However, this is actually what happened at a house party in Alaska hosted by paleontologist Dale Guthrie sometime in 1984. At the gathering, Guthrie served his guests a stew that contained neck meat from an unearthed fossil: a well-preserved steppe bison nicknamed "Blue Babe" after Paul Bunyan's blue ox.

The thought process behind Guthrie's move to serve his dinner guests with centuries-old meat wasn't clear. Blue Babe had been discovered five years before the house party. Initial findings led Guthrie and his team to believe that the bison's frozen remains were at least 36,000 years old, but more sophisticated technologies later on bumped this age to 50,000 years old. Perhaps it was the allure of trying a literal slice of biological history that drove Guthrie to cook the preserved animal's neck. After all, even the most outrageous things Anthony Bourdain has ever eaten could never hold a candle to this extremely rare delicacy.

Discovered in 1979 in Fairbanks, Alaska by miners Walter and Ruth Roman, the idea of trying a mummified steppe bison might have been enough to excite anyone invited to Dale Guthrie's little house party. Blue Babe's meat supposedly looked comparable to beef jerky, although, of course, we all know perfectly done beef jerky doesn't take as many lifetimes to prepare. "We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it," Guthrie described the experience in a document, which has since made it to the Food History Almanac.

For their meal, the scientists diced Blue Babe's neck tissue and transformed it into a stew, complete with stock and vegetables. Guthrie indicated that the meat of the bison, believed to have been frozen in the Alaskan permafrost since the Ice Age, didn't have an unpleasant smell, and instead compared it to beef. Taste-wise, he insisted that it was delicious. However, his wife, Mary Lee Guthrie, had a different take, saying it tasted worse than beef jerky. One could argue that taste is subjective, but then Guthrie himself seemingly retracted his initial statement in an interview with Atlas Obscura, saying: "It tasted a little bit like what I would have expected, with a little bit of wring of mud. But it wasn't that bad."