All soups—whether chicken or vegetable, vichyssoise or gazpacho, alphabet or mulligatawny—owe their existence to that first and original soup, the primordial soup that once bubbled over the steaming earth (recently, however, a breakaway faction of maverick scientists has argued that the primordial soup was in fact a primordial broth; French bio-chemists, on the other hand, have long maintained that it was a primordial bouillon). Although the primordial soup was first concocted a billion years ago, scientists did not posit its existence until 1956, deriving its name from the Latin primus, meaning first, and ordiri, meaning to begin.