Did they just find salt on the ground and lick it? Did they drink animal blood? Did they drink ocean water (I hope not)?
I’ve always wondered this since I was a little kid.
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Licking each other’s sweat (I’m joking).
On a serious note, I feel it was possible to get it from meat mainly. And fyi, a lot of veggies, dairy and stuff have sodium in it. But also considering the life expectancy back then was very low, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were deficient in it back then
You’ve wondered this since you were a kid and never once put your question into google?
Because all the answers here are exactly the same
When you visit Baka people in south east Cameroon ,a hunter gatherer culture ,it is considered good form to bring salt as a gift . They often have a goitre coming ,i believe ,from the lack of iodine from sea salt . Salt was found in the ground ,but often mixed with clay or rocks that has to be purified or eaten too . Animals too will gather in this places to lick rocks to get their sodium .
This kind of reminds me of the smile i get when i think of humans discovering the ocean for the first time and being WILDLY disappointed
You need a shockingly small amount of sodium to survive. Hunter-gatherers we’re quite small compared to the average modern human so their intake could’ve been slightly less. Almost all living things require sodium to exist and therefore almost all food has some sodium content. Meat would’ve probably been the main source of sodium.
I read a book about salt [Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky] and it seems that added salt became very important for people who stopped being hunter gatherers and lived off more grain products. Animal products generally have enough sodium so that minimal additional salt is necessary for health (plus, anyone eating seafood would get plenty of salt). People who lived off mostly grains needed to find or make concentrated salts. When Europeans went to America in the early days, they were very interested in where the native people got their salt (salt was a valuable commodity so they wanted to trade for it when possible), but some tribes didn’t even have the concept of it. (Some did, and had their own methods for getting salt in their diet, but some tribes just ate lots of meat and were fine.) Anyway it’s a great book, highly recommended.
They just ate everything man. Lots of them probably were sodium deficient. Lots of them would have found natural salt deposits and eaten it untill they were way past healthy levels.
Mountain goats are crazy at climbing because they like licking mineral deposits on sheer cliff edges. I would say humans used their intelligence to help out (probably figured out boiling sea water for salt, as well as which rock tastes good)
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