Is it true that, when Russians find mammoths preserved in ice, they thaw them and then eat their meat?
But a few brave souls have tried it. As always in such matters we turn for guidance to The World’s Smartest Human: “Anyone picturing a whole delicious world of mammoths up there in nature’s freezer case needs to face some basic facts. First, undamaged carcasses don’t turn up too often. Only a few near-intact mammoths have been discovered in the last 30 years or so — the extremely well-preserved calf found in Siberia this May being the latest — and a 1961 article in Science magazine reports that of 39 carcasses found to that point just 4 were reasonably complete. True, more remains will emerge as global warming thaws out the permafrost, but this brings us to our second problem: the meat that does survive is nearly always revolting. The Science article says that “all the frozen specimens were rotten,” and though some firsthand accounts of long-ago mammoth finds have claimed the flesh looked OK, typically it smelled horrifying and only wild scavengers and the locals’ dogs would eat it. Ev
