Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [8]
Still, for the most part, we ate salt opportunistically. With hunted meats and a range of plant foods providing us with sufficient minerals to survive, we had only infrequent physiological impetus to consume more salt than our diet naturally provided.
That all began to change about 12,000 years ago with the end of the last great ice age. For the first time in thousands of years, people could live in one place amid a relative abundance of food. Staying put gave us an opportunity to experiment and observe. It wasn’t long before we discovered that plants didn’t appear from nowhere but came from seed, and that some animals could be tamed. Archeologists have found domesticated figs dating to 9400 BCE; figs may have beaten the domestication of grains by a full thousand years. Next came the domestication of sheep, at around 8000 BCE; sometime around 7000 BCE, cattle and pigs were domesticated. We learned to cultivate barley, wheat, and legumes, built homes out of strong timbers and stone, and settled down.
These changes shifted our traditional supply of salt. Before, most of our salt came from the meat of animals caught in the wild, and to a lesser degree from foraged vegetables, roots, and fruits. Growing crops repeatedly in the same fields depleted the natural salinity of the soil, and we found our appetite for added salt growing. Without a ranging habitat, our livestock also needed an external source of salt. Modern milk cows may require as much as 80 pounds of salt per year, though Neolithic cattle likely needed closer to 6.6 pounds. Salt springs drew the first herdsmen and stockbreeders to settle in previously inhospitable lands. In addition to needing salt and arable land, the settlement pattern of the Neolithic age was determined in part by the availability of salt.
The Neolithic period is sometimes thought of as a time of relative calm, a dark age before the advent of the grand cultures of the ancient world. On the contrary, the millennia spanning about 15000 BCE to 5000 BCE were times of intense economic and cultural development. Our species was embracing a radically different lifestyle, adapting from a world where everything was found or hunted to one where by dint of foresight and labor we could provide for ourselves. Now we needed not just access to land, but ownership of land. We needed social conventions and laws that protected our work and property against greedy or needy neighbors, and politics and armies to protect against outsiders. Living on the same plot of land for years, generations, centuries, we optimized our farming practices, and nascent trade with others accelerated the development of new technologies.
During the Neolithic period, salt rapidly took on vital importance—for feeding ourselves and our livestock, and possibly for curing and preserving foods, tanning hides, producing dyes and other chemicals, and medicine. We evolved with a physiological requirement for salt; our culture was born from it. Access to salt became essential to survival. Salt localized groups of people. It was the first distinctively local food. It was also the first exotic one.
THE SALT TRADE
Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice, for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. —Michel de Montaigne
Farming and raising animals provided more food than we had previously known. Populations increased and people lived closer together. With the ability to produce food in abundance, we traded more. It became apparent that some groups could make things better and more easily than other groups. The specialization that started as individual artisanship within a village led to the specialization of entire villages. Some would make wool and cheese