by quick-freezing in the muck after the mammoths’ drowning and suffocating to death, then maintaining that frozen status for almost seven thousand years.

Perhaps the most noted of the thousands found thusly is the Beresovka mammoth, found near the Beresovka River in northern Siberia. Like all mammoths found wherein some comment was made concerning the skull, it was noted that his skull was pink from hemorrhaging in the head, plus the fact that he had a penile erection, both of these facts being evidence sufficient to prove that he suffocated to death in the surrounding homogenous muck. Further, he was frozen so fast and kept frozen for almost seven thousand years during which his erection was kept “on frozen record” constantly until he was found.

The Beresovka mammoth was found about 1900, and more scientific data was gathered and recorded about this animal than any other such frozen behemoth. It’s true that this beast also has initiated more scientific controversy than any other such find. To my way of thinking, one man’s work stands far above all others: Ivan T. Sanderson, the biologist. He approached the problem from a frozen foods viewpoint – and was the only one to do so. This is his story:

When you freeze meat, the problem is to freeze it last enough so the moisture contained in the meat does not have time to form into large crystals while freezing.

69

The faster the freeze, the smaller the crystals. If you freeze meat too slowly, the moisture will form crystals large enough to destroy the fibrous structure of the meat; when defrosted, the meat will he nothing more than a mass of goo, unfit to cook or eat. The larger the piece of meat to be frozen, the more difficult it is to freeze it fast enough to avoid formation of the destructive moisture crystals, for heat must be removed at the same rate from, say, half a steer as from half a pound of ground meat. It would be the same problem if you had to freeze a bucket or tub of water in the same time it takes to freeze a thimbleful.

Now a mammoth weighs up to five tons. Those mammoths found in Siberia were somewhat smaller, but still several-ton animals. When the Beresovka mammoth was dissected by Russian scientists in 1901, they recorded that even the innermost lining of the beast’s stomach had a perfectly preserved fibrous structure, indicating that his body heat had been removed by some super prodigious process in nature.

Sanderson, taking special notice of this one point, took the problem to the American Frozen Foods Institute: What does it take to freeze an entire mammoth so that the moisture content of even the innermost parts of his body, even to the inner lining of his stomach, do not have time enough to form crystals large enough to destroy the meat’s fibrous structure?

70

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109