One Of The World's Oldest Soups Included A Meat You Won't Be Able To Buy Today

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If you could time travel to 8,000 years ago and order a bowl of soup, chances are you'd get something very different from a creamy tomato soup or roasted butternut squash soup, as you might nowadays. Instead, one soup you might end up with would be made with hippopotamus meat.

According to food historian Ian Crofton in his book "A Curious History of Food and Drink," archaeologists in the Middle East found evidence of soup containing hippo bones dating to around 6,000 BCE. The soup likely included vegetables, lentils, and spices, too. Hippo soup appears to have been eaten in Mesopotamia (where modern-day Iraq is situated), considered one of the earliest civilizations on earth (and also where beer was invented). Nowadays, hippos are only found in Africa but at that time, they were more widespread, even inhabiting Europe.

Hippo probably wasn't the only unusual meat you'd eat in Mesopotamia: Crofton suggests that at that period, humans would probably eat any animal they could get their hands on, be it elephant, giraffe, or squirrel. That said, hunting hippopotamuses for food was probably a risky endeavor, as they're known for their particularly aggressive demeanor and regularly killing people. Yet their huge size probably made them a valuable catch — other civilizations like the ancient Egyptians also hunted them for their meat, fat, and skin. Hippo soup also wasn't the first soup humans ate: Archaeologists found 20,000-year-old pottery in China that suggests soup was being made millennia before the Mesopotamians.

If you're hoping to recreate Mesopotamian hippo soup, you have quite a challenge on your hands. Sure, the ingredients like lentils and vegetables should be easy to track down, but you'll have a difficult time sourcing hippopotamus meat. Hippos are considered a threatened species, and in 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced its intention to list hippos under the Endangered Species Act. However, in early 2025, a judge gave the Wildlife Service another three years to decide on the listing.

Technically speaking, this means hippo products are legal in the United States, and it's not uncommon for hippo teeth and leather products to be imported (although such imports are banned in some states, like Nevada). However, hippo meat is illegal, as it would be classed as "bushmeat," a category referring to all sorts of wild animals from monkeys to giraffes. Such meats are banned from import into the U.S. to protect against disease. 

That said, hippo meat is still eaten to a limited degree in some parts of Africa like Uganda and Zambia. Those who have sampled it say that it tastes a bit like pork, but some say it's not particularly comparable to other meats — it's also reportedly quite tough, so it's probably not worth expending too much energy to get your hands on it. Instead, you're better off sticking to pork, or another, delicious option.