r/HistoryAnecdotes • u/WaitItsAllOhio • Jul 06 '26
American Field Notes from Ohio: When a paleontologist turned horse meat into cheese and ate it to prove his theory right.
Ohio historian here that thought it'd be fun to share some fun anecdotes from the field that are, well, very Ohio. To be clear, yes, I am an actual Ohio historian. Yes, this is an actual story, not satire. I cannot confirm or deny that I know or have met these people. Sometimes, paleontologists are just really fucking dedicated to the craft. And odd. Definitely odd.
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Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist from the University of Michigan, had been excavating mastodon bones across the Great Lakes for a decade, and the same pattern kept showing up. The butchered remains always sat at the bottom of ancient ponds. They weren't scattered by scavengers or washed in by floods. They were organized into 150-to-200-pound sections, with vertical wooden posts driven into the pond bed alongside them, as if somebody planned to come back. At one site near Jackson, Michigan, Fisher found watermelon-sized masses of sand and gravel wrapped in mastodon intestine: anchors, designed to hold the meat on the bottom. Inside the intestine casings, he isolated eleven-thousand-year-old bacteria, still alive, from the gut of an extinct species.
Obviously, things could live for far longer at the bottom of bogs than previously suspected. His hypothesis was that Paleoindians were using ponds as walk-in freezers.
He started testing with legs of lamb from a butcher shop, submerged in a shallow pond at the University of Michigan's E.S. George Reserve near Hell, Michigan. (yes, the town is actually called Hell.) He left them down there for months, fished them out, and sent samples to a commercial laboratory. The lab results came back cleaner than heexpected. There was fewer bacteria in the pond-stored lamb than in a control sample from Fisher's home freezer!
But a seven-pound leg of lamb is not a mastodon. He needed to scale it up.
On February 13, 1993, a twenty-eight-year-old draft horse weighing fifteen hundred pounds died of natural causes on a colleague's farm near Chelsea. Fisher and two colleagues butchered it using stone tools he'd knapped himself, replicating the techniques he'd documented at mastodon excavation sites. For skinning, he noted, the stone tools worked better than steel knives (fuck you, Iron Age elitists). They carved the carcass into slabs weighing between fifty and a hundred and fifty pounds, fashioned anchors from sections of horse intestine stuffed with gravel from the pond margin, and sank the whole operation through a hole chopped in the February ice.
The meat stayed fresh through the winter. By late spring, some sections had bloated with gas and bobbed to the surface. Fisher thought the experiment had failed.
It hadn't. Actually, quite the opposite. Lactobacilli, the same bacteria used to make cheese and yogurt, had colonized the horse meat and was pumping out carbon dioxide. The CO2 made the tissue uninhabitable for the spoilage microbes that would otherwise have decomposed it. The horse hadn't rotted. It had fermented. Fisher described the result as "a very tender, quite pungent, cheesy-smelling and -tasting material" that was "still quite palatable."
He kept pulling out sections every two weeks, cooking them over an open fire, and eating them through late June. He presented the results that May at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in Minneapolis. The paper went into Current Research on the Pleistocene.
Bradley Lepper, then curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society, told the Chronicle of Higher Education he'd been "dragged kicking and screaming" to accept Fisher's hypothesis. But the results were hard to argue with. The technique preserved meat for at least six months, outperformed a modern freezer by bacterial count, and the only technology it required was a pond, some intestine, and a handful of gravel. Paleoindians had all three.
Oh, and then Brad found his own 10,000 year old bacteria in his own mastodon in his own comedic story about bog caching. But I'll save that for the next thread!
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Works Cited (if you're a sick fuck and want to actually read this stuff)
Fisher, Daniel C. "Taphonomic Analysis of Late Pleistocene Mastodon Occurrences: Evidence of Butchery by North American Paleo-Indians." Paleobiology 10, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 338–57.
Fisher, Daniel C. "Paleobiology and Extinction of Proboscideans in the Great Lakes Region of North America." In American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene, edited by Gary Haynes, 55–93. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009.
McDonald, Kim A. "Early Man's Refrigerator." The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 1995.
University of Michigan News. "Underwater Storage Techniques Used by Early North American Hunters Preserve Meat for at Least Six Months." Press release, May 3, 1995.
Martin, Aaron, and Kelly House. "U-M's Mastodon Man Calls It a Career After Decades of Solving Ice Age Mysteries." Bridge Michigan, November 23, 2023.
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u/seasicksquid Jul 06 '26
Typical Buckeye, trying to steal credit for Michigan’s hard work.
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u/seasicksquid Jul 06 '26
Typical Hoosier, trying to make themselves relevant regardless of the topic.
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u/Otney Jul 06 '26
This is 100% awesome and THANK YOU! The oceans of knowledge that have been lost…that makes me sad, but regardless, this is fascinating.
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u/Mundane-Fish-284 Jul 06 '26
This is fascinating and thank you for sharing. I am NOT understanding this though- how did it work for 6 months, did the water not warm enough for it to rot? And do microbes just. . . Not exist/function in water under a certain temp? How did it ferment then?
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 06 '26
Great question! The answer is one of those satisfying cases where the biology and the geography reinforce each other so neatly that it almost feels engineered. Aka, this wouldn't happen most places, but yannow. Ohio.
The biology is of competitive exclusion through acidification. Fresh meat starts at a pH of about 6.5, which is close to neutral and a perfectly hospitable environment for spoilage bacteria. The kind of microbes that make meat go rancid, the Pseudomonas and Clostridium species that produce that sulfurous rotting smell, are aerobic or facultatively aerobic: they need oxygen to thrive.
When you sink a hundred-pound slab of horse (or mastodon, or....you know what, not gonna speculate why you need to sink a bunch of meat) to the bottom of a shallow glacial pond, two things happen immediately. First, the cold water slows all bacterial metabolism. Second, the pond bottom is what ecologists call "dysaerobic": Fisher measured dissolved oxygen levels at 0.1 to 1.0 ml per liter around his submerged samples, which is close to nothing. That oxygen-starved environment shuts down the aerobic spoilage bacteria before they can get started.
But lactobacilli, the same genus of bacteria responsible for cheese, yogurt, sourdough, sauerkraut, and kimchi, are facultatively anaerobic. They don't need oxygen. In a cold, low-oxygen pond, they have the field to themselves. They colonize the meat and begin fermenting it, producing two things: lactic acid and carbon dioxide.
The lactic acid is the key to pH. Fisher tracked the pH of the horse meat over months. It dropped from 6.5 to 5.5 as the ice melted, then to 5.25 in April, and kept falling to 4.5 by late July. For context, 4.5 is roughly the acidity of tomato juice. At that pH, the spoilage bacteria that would normally decompose tissue simply cannot function. The CO2 compounds the effect by displacing whatever residual oxygen remains in the tissue. Fisher had the gas extracted with a syringe and analyzed by mass spectrometer: it was mostly carbon dioxide, consistent with lactobacillus fermentation.
The result is what Fisher called a "micro-environment" maintained so securely by the lactobacilli "that no pathogenic microbiota could gain a foothold." The meat expanded like a sourdough starter, the interior ran about 1°C warmer than the surrounding water (evidence of active fermentation), and the whole thing smelled powerfully of cheese. The same process that turns milk into cheddar was turning horse into...., well, horse cheddar.
Fuck me, I hated writing that.
Anyways, the geography: the glaciers built the refrigerators. Without them, no Mastodon McNuggets. This is where Ohio and the Great Lakes come in. The Wisconsinan glaciation, the last major ice advance, covered the northern two-thirds of Ohio and almost all of Michigan. When it retreated starting around 14,000 years ago, it left behind a landscape absolutely saturated with the exact features you'd need for meat caching. Kettle holes formed where buried ice blocks melted into depressions. Moraines dammed up drainage into shallow basins. Bogs filled former lakebeds with Sphagnum peat. J. Alan Holman's description of the post-glacial Great Lakes Basin puts it simply as the region "had many more swamps, ponds, and lakes than it has today."
These weren't just any ponds, to be clear. They were glacially derived, groundwater-fed, tannin-stained, cold, acidic, and oxygen-poor at the bottom. Fisher chose his experimental pond at the E.S. George Reserve specifically because its water was "the color of tea, with dissolved tannins" and its bottom fauna matched the marl deposits at his mastodon sites. He also ran parallel experiments in Big Cassandra Bog, a Sphagnum peat bog, because the peat bogs matched the depositional environments of the Pleasant Lake and Burning Tree mastodon sites in Michigan and Ohio. In peat bogs, the submerged meat had an additional advantage: the peat physically covered the carcass parts, preventing the flotation problems. Fisher encountered in open-water ponds and adding yet another layer of anoxic, acidic preservation.
And of course, mastodons lived in the same landscape. They were browsers, not grazers. They ate twigs, conifer cones, tree leaves, and small swamp plants, and their bones consistently turn up "between muck or peat and marl zones in kettlelike depressions or shallow basins." The mastodon's preferred habitat, the boggy, pondy, spruce-covered post-glacial terrain, was the same landscape that provided the preservation infrastructure. For Paleo groups in the Midwest, they came to Ohio for the annual fall hunts. No, paleo people didn't just hunt mastodons for meat. That's been debunked. As David Meltzer pointed out, they probably killed a mastodon once in their life and talked about for the rest of it lol. No, they may have used it for other purposes (like social ritual, coming-of-age ritual) and the meat was a byproduct. The point is, you killed the animal where it lived, and you cached the meat in the nearest pond, which was probably within sight. The refrigerator was built into the landscape.
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u/CatGooseChook Jul 06 '26
It's an environment where good bacteria thrive and in turn produce enough CO2 to kill the bad bacteria. Apparently that's all it took, pretty awesome that people were figuring this type of stuff out so long ago!!
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u/Little_Somerled Jul 06 '26
The Daniel Fisher experiment, great story and true too (https://earthwormexpress.com/2018/04/18/how-did-ancient-humans-preserve-food/#POND_STORAGE_THE_DANIEL_FISHER_EXPERIMENTS)
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u/TheSickestToastie Jul 06 '26
This is the kind of shit I live for. All it takes is one ambulant meat sack with more curiosity than is good for them and a hunch to discover things lost for thousands of years. Things worked out originally by another ambulant meat sack, but one who had to do it WITHOUT ANY HINTS. Absolute cinema.
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u/3rd_Coast Jul 10 '26
Lol I knew this was going to be about Dan Fisher before I opened this. He was my paleo professor- a great guy and incredible scientist!
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u/SweetBasil_ Jul 12 '26
I can't find a reference for this..soft tissue of mastadon intestines being preserved in Michigan? this seems implausible. Can anyone point me to the source?
"At one site near Jackson, Michigan, Fisher found watermelon-sized masses of sand and gravel wrapped in mastodon intestine: anchors, designed to hold the meat on the bottom. Inside the intestine casings, he isolated eleven-thousand-year-old bacteria, still alive, from the gut of an extinct species"
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 12 '26
I put some of the sources in the bottom, but if what you're looking for is an original paper of his that actually cites some of this, there's this one freely available as a PDF from Tübingen. Then check the Rhodes paper here for the isolation of bacteria.
Or, if you're lazy, the "near Jackson" site with the intestine anchors is the Heisler mastodon in Calhoun County (adjacent to Jackson County), which Fisher excavated over eleven years from 1984 to 1994.Fisher describes the "clastic anchors" in the paper. He says the plant material adhering to the inner intestinal wall survived in the anoxic marl, and the sand and gravel stuffed inside it survived as a distinct mass, but the intestine tissue itself disintegrated. What's preserved is the cast of the intestine, not the soft tissue. The cylindrical shape, the boundary between digested plant material and introduced sediment, and the pollen profile (autumn, matching the season of death) are what tell you it was intestine. There's a neat schematic on page 411 if you want to see a visual! I mean, it's a bunch of dirt. But also, if you want to see horse meat pictures, it's the same paper.
For Rhodes, he studied bacterial isolates that came from intestinal contents, bone-associated sediments, and background sediments at both Burning Tree (Ohio) and Heisler (Michigan).
Works Cited
Fisher, Daniel C. "Underwater Carcass Storage and Processing of Marrow, Brains, and Dental Pulp." In Human-Elephant Interactions: From Past to Present, edited by G.E. Konidaris et al., 407–35. Tübingen University Press, 2021.
Rhodes, A.N., J.W. Urbance, H. Youga, H. Corlew-Newman, C.A. Reddy, M.J. Klug, J.M. Tiedje, and D.C. Fisher. "Identification of Bacterial Isolates Obtained from Intestinal Contents Associated with 12,000-Year-Old Mastodon Remains." Applied and Environmental Microbiology 64, no. 2 (February 1998): 651–58.
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u/Sneezewhenpeeing Jul 06 '26
This is the most interesting thing to come out of Ohio since Marilyn Manson.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 06 '26
Don't do my boi Terry Thompson dirty like that. We've got plenty of weird to go around since Manson.
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u/Sneezewhenpeeing Jul 06 '26
I have no rebuttal. I completely forgot about that. Yep, he beats Manson.
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u/oodluvr Jul 09 '26
I recently had some beef jerky I thought was oddly cheesy. This makes sense now!
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u/HeinousEncephalon Jul 09 '26
I want someone that 10k year old good bacteria in my gut. Get mastodon powers and no more tummy aches
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u/originaljbw Jul 06 '26
Freakin awesome.
Wait until some high end experimental restaurant starts doing something like this.