There have been other occasions when modern people ate frozen representatives of the Pleistocene megafauna found in icy landscapes

There have been other occasions when modern people ate frozen representatives of the Pleistocene megafauna found in icy landscapes. And I am not speaking of Andrew Bergman's crime comedy "The Freshman", in which, for a million dollars, Hawaiian tiger fish mixed with smoked turkey was served up as the meat of endangered species.

Charles Darwin, in all likelihood, tasted every species he wrote about. As for the palaeontologist Dale Guthrie, who found a superbly preserved steppe bison, 36,000 years old, in the Yukon (and to whom, incidentally, I refer in my first book), he recounted that in April 1984 he cooked a stew from the meat of the famous bison, named Blue Babe. He took a small piece of the neck from the mummified remains, cut it into cubes, simmered it slowly in a pot with stock and vegetables, and served this culinary splendour, worthy of every Michelin star, for supper. According to Dr Guthrie, the meat was well hung, yet still a little tough, and gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma.