Fat
Even crude Oldowan stone tools would have allowed early humans access to brain and marrow from a broad range of animals obtained by scavenging or hunting - including some species larger than those from which chimpanzee hunters preferentially extract brain tissue and marrow fat. These and other carcass fats were probably prized by the early hominids as they are by recently-observed modern human hunter-gatherers. (Stefansson, 1960).
Most prized (to American Indians) was the internal kidney fat of ruminant animals, which can be as high as 65 percent saturated.
The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spent many years with the Indians, noted that they preferred 'the flesh of older animals to that of calves, yearlings and two-year olds... It is approximately so with those northern forest Indians with whom I have hunted, and probably with all caribou-eaters.' The Indians preferred the older animals because they had built up a thick slab of fat along the back. In an animal of 1000 pounds, this slab could weigh 40 to 50 pounds. Another 20-30 pounds of highly saturated fat could be removed from the cavity. This fat was saved, sometimes by rendering, stored in the bladder or large intestine, and consumed with dried or smoked lean meat. Used in this way, fat contributed almost 80 percent of total calories in the diets of the northern Indians.
Beaver was highly prized, especially the tail because it was rich in fat. But small animals like rabbit and squirrel were eaten only when nothing else was available because, according to Stefansson, they were so low in fat.
'The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate, in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source - beaver, moose, fish - will develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied.'
The marrow was full of fat and was usually eaten raw. Eaton and other report that the marrow is rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids but Stefansson describes two types of marrow, one type from the lower leg which is soft 'more like a particularly delicious cream in flavor' and another from the humerus and femur that is 'hard and tallowy at room temperatures.'
Sometimes the Indians selected only the fatty parts of the animal, throwing the rest away. 'On the twenty-second of July,' writes Samuel Hearne, 'we met several strangers, whom we joined in pursuit of the caribou, which were at this time so plentiful that we got everyday a sufficient number for our support, and indeed too frequently killed several merely for the tongues, marrow and fat.'
Cabeza de Vaca reports that the Indians of Texas kept the skin of the bear and ate the fat, but threw the rest away. Other groups ate the entire animal, including the head, but recognized the fat as the most valuable part. Colonist William Byrd, writing in 1728, 'The flesh of bear hath a good relish, very savory and inclining nearest to taht of Pork. The Fat of this Creature is least to rise in the Stomach of any other.' Bear grease was thought to give them resistance by making them physically strong.
Animal fats, organ meats and fatty fish all supply fat-soluble vitamins A and D, which Weston Price recognized as the basis of healthy primitive diets. These nutrients are catalysts to the assimilation of protein and minerals.
Certain fatty glands of game animals also provided vitamin C during the long winter season in the North. When an animal was killed, the adrenal gland and its fat were cut up and shared with all members of the tribe.
