Meat Has Been Frozen For Over 100,000 Years

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 93, 30 May 1949, Page 7

Meat Has Been Frozen For Over 100,000 Years

There are many homes at Whakatane that have refrigerators and' in some they have become a necessity during the warmer months. This applies also to other homes, hotels and places where food is stored. To New Zealand anyway the refrigerator has been an important invention in the storing of meat although meat cooling is not knew. In fact it is thousands of years old.

In parts of Siberia temperatures of 63 degrees below zero have been noted, but for consistent cold the frigid record of Verkhoyansk, a small town on the River Yana, is unbeaten. Snow falls there on 290 days and more every year, and the ground *s frozen to a depth of 600 feet.

Yet Verkhoyansk has an almost unbelievable range of temperatures. From the terrible icy cold of winter the mercury in the thermometer rises there in the brief summer to 60 degrees.

The soil in this quarter must have lain frozen as it is today for at least 100,000 years.

The ' enormous plains, the vast frozen marshes, river courses and wide estuaries, are the cemeteries of great multitudes of mammoths and other animals. Every few years the summer heat melts sufficient surface to expose mammoth remains. This frost of 100,000 years is the perfect refrigerator. When mammoths have suddenly appeared entire above the soil from which the sun has expelled the ice, their flesh has been found perfectly fresh, and the last meal of pine-cones undigested in their stomachs, just as when the doomed giant was engulfed.

The flesh of such mammoths has been brought to England before now and eaten with enjoyment at a private dinner for distinguished scientists.