I have to wonder what was going through the mind of the first person who stored some milk in a sheep's stomach, waited a few days, and decided, "Hey, this coagulated mess looks like something I'd like to eat"
In the past when everyone lived on the edge of starvation you could not be so fussy in what you ate. If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat take a look (from a great distance and upwind) at Hákarl [1].
Apart from the smell, this is not different from tons of other cured meats, salami, beef jerky etc (actually, beef jerky doesn't smell that nice, either).
More of a cultural thing than starvation? Especially since Icelanders are pretty well off, and as far from starvation as possible and still eat it...
I am pretty impressed that icelanders worked out how you could eat such an animal - who would have guessed burying it in the ground, urinating on the grave, and then coming back six month later was the difference between death and total disgust.
The Icelandic people might not be starving today, but they certainly had a hard time in the past.
What went through their mind? Perhaps that milk spoils way too quickly and food that you can store for long periods of time is vital for survival. They probably would have known a great deal about the preparation and preservation of food in general, like the use of fire or that drying and covering food makes it last much longer.
Their tolerance for food with strong unpleasant flavors would have been much higher than yours or mine and they would have had knowledge on how to test potentially dangerous substances to see how edible they are.
If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk.
Early homo sapiens were pretty smart and had skills few of us today possess.
I think a lot of the people replying here are thinking "yogurt" when they ought to be thinking "fresh farmers cheese."
You can make cheese without any sheep stomach involved, so it was probably more of an "Ah ha! Faster cheese!" sort of moment.
"Upon killing a kid, a farmer simply takes its milk-filled stomach, ties it off in a tight knot or sews it shut, perhaps covers it in mesh to keep the flies off, then hangs it from the ceiling of a cool, dark room. He then waits for a few months until the natural rennet within curdles and hardens the milk into a thick, creamy cheese..."
Jailing someone is a relatively modern invention, back then they preferred corporal punishment (lashing most often).
And anyone rich enough to have slaves probably did not need to test random foods since they already had what they needed.
War captives maybe, or those condemned to die, but those are state things, and the state is unlikely to need to test foods.
They most likely used animals, same as we do today. Dogs would be my guess.
Your comment reminded me of a YouTube channel I find weirdly (perhaps morbidly) fascinating [2]. Once your body is acclimated to eating dubious quality materials, even in modern society, it seems that you're less likely to get sick provided you're still relatively careful (not that I'd recommend it). Steve1989 has gotten sick from his adventures, although surprisingly it was from a more recent Ukranian MRE contaminated with E. coli, and not from some of the more expected sources. It's worth watching a few of his videos if you can stomach it, if not for the surprise at what questionable materials he actually gets down, but for the unusual number and types of things that have survived (he's eaten a cookie from 1951, 61 year old peanut butter, and even Civil War era hardtack).
I guess my memory was triggered by your mention of numb lips. As I understand it from the channel above, rancid nuts are particularly bad at causing numbness and swelling. I certainly wouldn't recommend trying anything of the sort unless you were absolutely desperate!
Definitely check out his channel. It's gross, I'll warn you, but it's also fascinating.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC106573/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/vid...
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/abs/nature11...
I believe bread, beer and wine pre-date cheese, and so the idea of a transformation through some agent wasn't that far-fetched. And milk obviously is nutritous. I'm not sure, but can you make sorta cheese, in the way that rotting fruit is natural fermentation, and dough can rise from wild-yeast (and unlevened bread was being eaten already). Once the idea is born, you can work to improve it.
It's easy to think of primitive humans as dummies, but they were probably smarter than most of us, and once they got an idea, they would tweak it. Plus, it only takes one clever and lucky person in a network of communities to hit on an improvement, for it to spread.
But there's a question of why the lactose tolerant mutation spread so widely... was there a starvation event? An outcompeting, or invasion by stronger, milk-fed warriors?
But I expect cheese making eating was very wide-spread well before this event, and it was a great source of calories. Blessed are the cheese makers.
It seems calorical contribution was the main factor in sub-saharan africa but in europe (the other main source of the mutation) it is mostly linked to vitamin D deficiency (the mutation spread from areas with less sun, especially inland areas with limited access to fish).
It's not just a thought, the lactose tolerance mutations have been reasonably well tracked in time and space.
> cheese consumption was a step on the way to adult tolerance, in those cultures that developed it.
That however doesn't make much sense, most cheese-based cultures remain broadly lactose-intolerant. Some of the earliest cheese evidences come from the middle-east, northern africa and central asia, which have limited to very limited rates of adult lactase persistence.
If you look at Europe's map of lactase persistence, rates fall as you head south, where the oldest evidence of cheese-making cultures are, cheese spread from the south but lactase persistence spread from the north (Roman authors specifically recorded germanic tribes/cultures as drinkers of raw milk), more closely linked to vitamin D intake necessity.