It takes a lot of fuel to conquer a large part of two continents by horseback. But the Mongolians had been developing a strong culinary tradition they could carry along with them for roughly 2,000 years before they swept across much of Eurasia.
Now, new research gives us a closer look at what kinds of foods the nomadic pastoralists of the Mongolian steppe were eating around 700 B.C.E. by examining the protein residues left in ancient cauldrons — and the findings are a little bloody.
“This practice of collecting the blood and not wasting any of the animals went back a lot farther than we knew from historic documents,” says Shevan Wilkin, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Life in Ancient Mongolia
As Wilkin and her colleagues reported in a study published recently in Scientific Reports, the leather dated back to 700 B.C.E., nearly 2,000 years before Genghis Khan was born in the mid-1100s C.E. Based on previous research, archeologists know that Mongolians in this period were nomadic pastoralists, rotating herds of ruminants like sheep, goats, and yaks between pastures.
