The human body needs salt to function properly, but surely First Nations of the prairies, people of central Africa or of Central Europe, from the Mongolian steppes and from other landlocked places, couldn’t have access to salt marshes. So where did they get it from?
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You need sodium not salt
Plenty of food contains sodium. 100 grams of tomato contains 5mg of sodium. Beef contains 50 mg per 100 grams. Even grains like wheat naturally contain some level of sodium
Importing salt was nice because it made food taste better and supported preservation, but it wasn’t critical for survival
Here on the prairies, there are some naturally occuring salt-licks. This whole area used to be a sea bed back 100 million years ago, so there’s also large salt-flats to the north and south of where I live.
Trading routes between indigenous first Nations connected them. There are also known trading routes from my side of the rocky mountains to the Kootenay range, and safe to assume some sort of trading network existed all the way to the ocean. It may not have been reliable, but between food sources (especially when including organ meats and blood) and naturally occuring rock salt, and trading with nearer salt flats, prarie people were able to get enough to live.
There’s a book about this! Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky.
The answer varies by location, but salt was most commonly obtained either by mining or (more commonly) by evaporating water & collecting the salt left behind. It was historically a very common trade good, so locations which lacked robust salt production simply traded for it. There isn’t really a period of human history where zero cultural exchange was taking place; we were always trading with each other, just not on the large scale modern advances in transportation allow for today.
Salt (and other goods were) traded since civilization began. The earliest records of writing a receipts for trade, so it’s not as if people couldn’t do anything without modern means of transportation. As for salt – even isolated hunter gatherers would get enough from necessarily varied diet; it’s only when agriculture became prominent and nutritional habits changed to one major staple that you’d need supplementation. Salt was normally used as a preservative primarily, not as a flavor additive.
We don’t need much salt.
We like the taste of salt.
We like the effect that salt has in the taste of food.
Salt preserves food.
But we didn’t NEED much salt.
Rural areas of S America and Africa have low salt intake, about 1150 mg per day, with no ill effects.
As pointed out – it was valuable enough to be used as a currency and whole economies depended on it. I read this Autor’s book “COD” ( Highly recommended) but I think “SALT” sold more copies and is better rated:
[https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebook/dp/B00BPDN33W/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3CSTABW2ZLZO7&keywords=kurlansky+salt&qid=1685811931&sprefix=kurlansky+salt%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-2](https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebook/dp/B00BPDN33W/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3CSTABW2ZLZO7&keywords=kurlansky+salt&qid=1685811931&sprefix=kurlansky+salt%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-2)
There’s still salt even far from the sea, in most places. In northern Utah, for example, there’s a place called the “Great Salt Lake.” It lives up to its name. (Or at least it lives up to the “Salt” and “Lake” parts of its name. “Great” is debatable, for reasons I’ll discuss momentarily.) It’s what’s known as a “terminal lake” meaning it has no natural outflow- water flows into it and just stays until it evaporates. Terminal lakes are in general very salty, and despite being called “Great” the Great Salt Lake is far from the largest. Even freshwater contains some amount of salt, and when it flows into and evaporates out of a terminal lake, it leaves that salt behind, to be concentrated over the years, until the lake contains far more salt than a group of pre-industrial people could ever hope to use.
EDIT: I’ve just looked it up. The Great Salt Lake is over 600 miles inland, and is only the eighth largest terminal lake in the world, so I feel its title of “Great” is a little grandiose. They should have called it the Medium-sized Salt Lake.
they did
1) evaporation of sea water (cossaks in Ukraine)
2) gathering salt at seashore (eg greek)
3) drank animal blood ( eg Yakuts in Siberia)
4) red meat and some fruits have a lot of sodium
Animals move. Animals carry salt. Sea animals are eaten by land animals (think fish : bears). Those animals move inland and die, get eaten by carrion feeders, who move further inland. Eventually, and in a sustained and continual loop, salt makes it way from the oceans to the land, to the inland, and back again.
Rain often carries salt, especially along the western coasts of continents. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but much of long-ago living areas were either on the ocean, or on the western side of their respective continents. Wind and rain and hurricanes carry salt from the ocean over the land (okay, they carry water which is infused with salt). And again, we have animals drinking the water, humans eating the animals.
Then there are salt marshes, which you rightly pointed out. Those exist. But there are also salt *mines*, where massive amounts of salt are stored by the Earth from deposits made in earlier geologic periods, and then there are salt *licks*. Aside from them being relatively small compared to a mine and that they’re associated with (goats? I think it is), I’m not sure what they are, exactly, but they sure *sound* like a large supply of salt to me.
TL;DR: Salt, especially salt in the form of sodium chloride, is not nearly as rare as it might at first seem.
Stone soup, I was taught about it and how to make it when I was young. It is basically just soup that contains a large rock usually from a river. As its boiled with the soup it apparently releases salts into the mix.
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