How Did Humans Start Eating Salt?

How did humans start eating salt, when for a million years nobody saw a grain of it? Your body cannot make sodium, meat supplied it, and the first farms took it away. This video traces the craving from animal salt licks to the first salt works on Earth. This video covers: • Why your body cannot make sodium and what happens without it • How hunters got their salt from meat without knowing it • How farming 10,000 years ago switched on a hardwired salt craving • The elephants that mine Kitum Cave in total darkness • The oldest salt works: Poiana Slatinei, Solnitsata, Yuncheng, Duzdagi • How salt preserves meat and kept a 2,700-year-old lunch • Salary, Taghaza and Gandhi's Salt March Does your town have salt in its name? Tell us in the comments, and subscribe for more stories from the deep human past. ────────── Sources: Weller & Dumitroaia — The earliest salt production in the world: an early Neolithic exploitation in Poiana Slatinei-Lunca, Romania, Antiquity Project Gallery, 2005 Cone et al. — Physiological state gates acquisition and expression of mesolimbic reward prediction signals, PNAS, 2016 Chandrashekar et al. — The cells and peripheral representation of sodium taste in mice, Nature, 2010 Konner & Eaton — Paleolithic Nutrition: Twenty-Five Years Later, Nutrition in Clinical Practice, 2010 (and Eaton & Konner, NEJM, 1985) Natural History Museum Vienna / Eurac Research — Beer and blue cheese already on the menu 2,700 years ago (Current Biology study), 2021 CNRS — Oldest known salt mine located in Azerbaijan (Duzdagi), ScienceDaily, 2010 FAO — Methods of meat preservation without refrigeration (Manual of simple methods of meat preservation) MSD Manual Professional — Hyponatremia CDC — About Sodium and Health Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Butchered animal bones from Gona, Ethiopia (Human Origins) Al Jazeera — Europe's "oldest town" found in Bulgaria (Vasil Nikolov on Provadia-Solnitsata), 2012 Wikipedia — Salt March; Salary; Taghaza; Kitum Cave; Varna Necropolis; Na+/K+-ATPase Disclaimer: For educational and entertainment purposes. Some interpretations are actively debated among researchers and may change as new evidence emerges. Not professional advice. #salt #historyofsalt #ancienthumans #humanhistory #foodhistory #archaeology #saltmarch