Putrid Meat in Human Diet and Evolution (and Other Things)

Health scientists believe that eating rotten, maggoty meat is dangerous because it contains pathogens like botulism. Psychologists and biologists assume that natural selection favored the development of a "disgust response" to protect us from ingesting pathogens, with putrid meat and maggots topping the list of genetically hardwired disgust elicitors. The ethnohistoric record shows this explanation to be false: eating rotten, maggoty meat was nearly universal outside of major Western and colonial centers until about WWI, and rotten meat was often preferred. The aversion to eating carrion emerged in the eastern Mediterranean region, probably during the Bronze Age, not for health reasons, but as a way of remaining pure in the eyes of God. Insights from the full, five-hundred-year-long ethnohistoric record also challenge some of Binford's classic subsistence-settlement models (logistical mobility, utility indices). Women were often participants in long-distance multi-day hunts and, as a result, the archaeological signatures of such hunts are unlikely to be of the single-sex task-specific nature anticipated by Binford. Also, northern foragers avoid eating muscle meat because it lacks fat and either feed it to their dogs or discard it. Time permitting, I will also discuss a few other interesting insights from the ethnohistoric record.