Refrigeration is a pretty new phenomenon, so for millennia, people had to find clever ways to preserve food.

"The pond offers a place to stash carcass parts," Daniel Fisher, a professor and curator in the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, told Live Science.

The bacteria colonize the meat, and the lactic acid preserves the muscle mass.

The meat remained edible until the following summer.

He found that the meat was still edible (after cooking it first to kill any harmful bacteria that might have taken up residence in the meat), even after spending months submerged in similar small, cold ponds. .

"The lactic acid also tenderizes the meat," Fisher said?

Burying food is another ingenious way to keep food fresh?

In Northern Europe, ancient civilizations would put food, including butter, into the bog to preserve it.

"Within two or three years, the fat in the fresh butter degrades into constituent components," said Jessica Smyth, an assistant professor in the University College Dublin School of Archaeology who published a 2019 study on bog butter in the journal Nature.

Bogs offered early agricultural communities a way to preserve perishable foods, like dairy products, for a longer period.

The curated butter is edible, but it may take on the tangy flavors of the surrounding peat that is an acquired taste. .

"It is easy to look at bog butter as an anomaly or freak event, but it was probably a common practice," Smyth told Live Science.

Originally published on Live Science.