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" It&amp;#039;s always been hard to quantify the sheer joy that you might get eating a bowl of piping-hot soup. Soup heals us, fills us, and is, above all, easy to make. The reason we love soup, as NPR&amp;#039;s Salt blog tells it, is because it has been part of our history for much longer than we thought. Looks like the numbers were off by about 15,000 years: It now looks like waterproof and heatproof containers were invented much earlier than previously thought. 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. &amp;quot;When you look at the pots, you can see that they were in a fire,&amp;quot; Bar-Yosef says. So they were definitely brewing something. And while, yes, it could have been alcohol, the notion that soup was being made is comforting considering there was an Ice Age still happening around that time (as opposed to soup&amp;#039;s formerly accepted 5,000-to-9,000-year age estimates). But there&amp;#039;s also evidence that shows our ancestors might have been eating soup even before then:  Speth has argued that Neanderthals, ancient human relatives that lived from around 200,000 to 28,000 years ago, would have needed boiling technology to render fat from animal bones to supplement their diet of lean meat, so that they could have avoided death by protein poisoning. The kidneys and liver are limited in how much protein they can process in a day \u2014 when more than that amount is consumed, ammonia or urea levels in the blood can increase, leading to headaches, fatigue and even death. So humans must get more than half their calories from fat and carbohydrates. If Neanderthals were boiling bones to obtain the fat, they could have drunk the resulting broth, Speth says.  In other words, it&amp;#039;s not out of the question to consider that Carl Weathers or the Soup Nazi had Neanderthal precursors:           [Via The Salt] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a19070/neanderthals-cooked-soup-15067739/>