Finding evidence of such boiling, though, would be incredibly difficult because those types of materials usually don't get preserved in the archaeological record. Long-ago cooks could have fashioned such a container from tree bark or the hide of an animal, Speth says.
All you need is a waterproof container suspended over a fire - the water inside keeps the material from burning. "You can boil without using heated stones," Speth realized. He started thinking about ancient boiling after watching an episode of the television show " Survivorman," in which host Les Stroud boils water in a plastic container. The power of the expanding steam cracks the rocks, a distinct characteristic that first shows up in the archaeological record around 25,000 years ago in Western Europe, says archaeologist John Speth, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.īut Speth says boiling, and soup, could be even older. Meat Week The Time Traveler's Cookbook: Meat-Lover's Edition Whatever it was, the discovery shows that waterproof, heatproof containers are far older than a mere 5,000 years. Perhaps it was alcohol, or maybe it was soup. Their discovery is possibly the world's oldest-known cookware, but exactly what its users were brewing up isn't certain. "When you look at the pots, you can see that they were in a fire," Bar-Yosef says. Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef and colleagues reported last year in Science on their finding of 20,000-year-old pottery from a cave in China. It now looks like waterproof and heatproof containers were invented much earlier than previously thought. That's probably wrong - by at least 15,000 years. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America says, for example, "boiling was not a commonly used cooking technique until the invention of waterproof and heatproof containers about five thousand years ago." Most sources state that soup making did not become commonplace until somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. So who concocted that first bowl of soup? But through much of human history, soup was much simpler, requiring nothing more than boiling a haunch of meat or other chunk of food in water to create a warm, nourishing broth.
Soup comes in many variations - chicken noodle, creamy tomato, potato and leek, to name a few. The tradition of making soup is probably at least 25,000 years old, says one archaeologist.
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