What Happens to Meat When You Freeze It for 35,000 Years

Up in the Arctic cold, frozen woolly-mammoth carcasses can be so well preserved that they still have blood in their veins. Their flesh is still pink—which means that, of course, yes, someone has thought about eating it. Tales of dining on woolly mammoths frozen since the Ice Age range from the fantastical to the truer and grosser. Let us start—why not?—with the fantastical stories.

In 1901, an expedition to the Beresovca River in Siberia, ”particularly the course of mammoth steak, which all the learned guests declared was agreeable to the taste, and not much tougher than some of the sirloin furnished by butchers of today.”