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Editor’s be aware: The United Kingdom’s Meals Requirements Authority and Well being Safety Company each advise towards consuming clay, soil or earth. Hyperlinks to their steerage are integrated on this article.

Once I ask other folks if they have got ever eaten soil ahead of, they generally tend to present me a bizarre glance. However geophagy – the planned ingestion of any more or less soil – is a convention that archaeological proof from Kalambo Falls in Zambia suggests has been a part of human historical past for a minimum of 2 million years.

British archaeologist John Desmond Clark reported that Homo habilis, a species of human who lived between 2.2 and 1.6 million years in the past, was once digging into the earth to mine clays from underneath the topsoil. This resulted in the inference that the oldest proof of geophagy through people was once at that prehistoric web site at the border of Zambia and Tanzania.

Extra lately, anecdotal proof suggests a prisoner condemned to demise in Sixteenth-century Hohenlohe (now a part of Germany) was once allowed a final request of eating a small clay pill after receiving his supposedly deadly dose of mercury. The pill was once seemingly a work of terra sigillata – clay historically mined from the Greek island of Lemnos. To the amazement of the court docket, the convict survived the mercury poisoning and was once simply banished as a substitute.

Geophagy remains to be practised broadly world wide, together with through…

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Author : bq3anews

Publish date : 2026-03-25 20:34:00

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