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Three thousand five hundred million years ago
Cyanobacteria (formerlyknown as bleu-green algae; now known as Cyanoprokaryotes) already wereflourishing on Earth. It wasn't until two thousand million years laterthat green plants, Eucaryotes, made their appearance. The Dinosaurs arrived about one hundred ninety million years ago; and we've only been here for a handful of years by comparison.
Spirulina has been around for a very long time, just waiting to help us with our nutrition problems. We don't know if earlier man recognized the food value of Spirulina, but we do know that two groups of people in historical times discovered it; and profited from it. These are the Aztecs of Mexico and the Kanembous of Chad. It still flourishes in Mexico and the custom of collecting, sun-drying, and preparing it never completely died out in Mexico.
In Chad, Spirulina still is a staple of the diet of the people living near the small lakes in the dunes that border Lake Chad. Curious, two tribes living an ocean apart discovering this unlikely looking food and hitting upon the same techniques for separating its microscopic filaments from the water, sun-drying it, and adding it to calorie-rich foods to give themselves a complete nutrition.
SOSA TEXCOCO S.A.
About 35 years ago
Hubert Durand Chastel and Maurice David of SOSA TEXCOCO, producer of carbonates from the waters of the Aztecs' Spirulina lakes in Mexico, along with Geneviève Clément of the French Petroleum Institute, discovered that the bothersome microalgae in Lake
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