Eli5: how did humans get salt before modern means of transportation

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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