Salt is a vital element for all life forms and is abundant the world over- especially in the oceans that cover around 70% of the earth's surface. If the oceans would dry up, a 360 m thick layer of salt would appear.
Salt has been an important part of the human diet since the beginning of time. The hunters and collectors of the Stone Age, whose nutrition consisted primarily of meat, ingested sufficient salt to cover the daily requirement of 3 to 5 grams dur to the salt contained in the animal fibers. With the transition to a more sedentary lifestyle and the partial change in diet to plant nutrition, man was forced to look for other sources to obtain salt. He quickly discovered that if sea water or other saline water evaporated in the sun, that dry salt was left over. And by following the saline streams to their sources, man found subterranean depots and soon began to mine salt.
Trough the ages, salt was always known as something holy and each culture utilized it in its own way. It was used as a currency, a preservative or for religious and cultural rituals. In ancient times and in the Middle Ages, salt was so precious that it was referred to as "white gold". Even wars and political struggles were fought about it, before new extraction methods were developed and the discovery of larger salt deposits made it affordable for everyone.
