An Ode to Chicken Soup

Here's something you probably already knew: homo sapiens started out as a scavenger species.

Here's something you probably didn't know: homo sapiens may have invented our first tools for the specific purpose of cracking open bones.

While meat and processed grain are generally the preferred source of calories in the modern era, early humans and their ancestors had to make do with wild forage (a lot of hazelnuts, which sounds nice) and the parts of a dead animal which larger, more dangerous predators didn't want (which sounds less nice). As a consequence, early hominids, including homo sapiens, acquired the necessary nutritional requirements by ingesting and digesting bones, more particularly; bone marrow. (For more, see The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber) This habit was hardly easy for early humans, since marrow extraction is a lot of work. Hence, from about 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors developed specialized tools (mostly stone axes in the early days) which were indispensable for cracking open animal bones, particularly, the bones of large animals like the mammoth.

Here's something you probably already knew: we've been boiling things for a long time.

Here's something you probably didn't know: Ofer Bar-Yosef and colleagues published a paper in 2012 in Nature on the origins of boiling, which points to our use of boiling as a technique more than 20,000 years ago.

Depending on how much cooking you do, you may already know that one of the best ways to get marrow out of bone is by boiling it to produce broth. If you have ever eaten chicken noodle soup, whether homemade or from a can, chances are pretty good that the broth was made from boiling chicken bones. While the modern industrial process admittedly bears little resemblance to the clay pots found in Xianrendong Cave, the purpose and fundamental idea remain unchanged from a time before the invention of agriculture. Our ancestors boiled bones to create broth, and used that broth as a staple food, just like we do. In fact, bone broth may have been the very first kind of "cooked food".

It's true that chicken bones wouldn't have been our only, or even our primary, choice when we first started boiling water all those millennia ago, but if you've ever read (or had read to you) Soup from a Stone, you know how little difference one ingredient makes in something as archetypical as soup. It may have a slightly different flavor profile (imagine mammoth-broth), but the thing we eat when we're sick, or when it's cold out, or when we're feeling homesick and want a reminder of days when the world had fewer demands and more swing sets, that thing is homoousian -of the same stuff- as the dish enjoyed by our ancient ancestors.

In my more reflective moments, I can't help but smile on that idea. If I, or they, were to cross the intervening millennia in a single bound we'd have no common language, no shared musical tastes, no understanding of one another's lives, but we'd still be able to sit down and enjoy a bowl of hot chicken soup, just like mom used to make.