The world’s oldest bread has been found at an archaeological site in Jordan, proving humanity’s love of bread goes back thousands of years.
Archaeologists found the scraps of what is believed to be flatbread around a fireplace at a Natufian hunter-gatherer site called Shubayqa, located in northeastern Jordan.
It’s believed to be around 14,400 years old.
Unfortunately, this important carby artefact doesn’t look like a loaf that you’d find at an artisan bakery - it’s more like burnt toast crumbs.
These tiny fragments of bready history were discovered after researcher sieved the contents of two fireplaces inside the remains of ancient structures on the site.
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As we read in a study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, researchers found 24 charred food remains categorized as “bread-like”.
And after extremely detailed, painstaking research on these crumbs, it appears the people who made them were bread masters.
Researchers noted the flour appeared to be “meticulously ground and carefully sieved” in a manner similar to modern flours.
“The prevalence of hand-stones and lower grinding implements at the site shows that grinding was a regularly practiced activity and suggests that the inhabitants were skilled in processing raw materials such as plants,” they said.
This is especially impressive considering the settlement pre-dates farming, a good 4000 years before agriculture emerged in southwest Asia.
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As co-author Tobias Richter of University of Copenhagen told George Dvorsky at Gizmodo, it was originally thought bread came after agriculture.
And for the pre-agriculture bread to be such a decent loaf is incredibly surprising.
“We didn’t expect to find such high-quality flour this early on in human history,” Richter said.
“The hunter-gatherer bread we have does not only contain flour from wild barley, wheat and oats, but also from tubers, namely tubers from water plants.
“The bread was therefore more of a multi-grain-tuber bread, rather than a white loaf.”
So even if they weren’t strictly keeping to the Paleo diet, these ancient people were at least on the clean eating path with their multi-grain bread.
