November 26, 2018

The oldest bread in the world

by Rebecca Sherratt, Production editor, Milling & Grain

Scientists at a 14,000-year-old dig site have uncovered the earliest-known evidence of bread-making. Found in the Black Desert in Amman, Jordan, this shocking discovery has extended the first evidence of bread by more than 5,000 years.

The advent of agriculture, before this amazing find, was originally predated 4000 years later, leaving scientists baffled by the revelations this ancient loaf has given us. Before this, it was originally thought that the Neolithic people, of the Stone Age, were the inventors of bread approximately 9,000 years ago, in Çatalhöyük in Turkey.
 


The Neolithic people made bread by producing flour, comprised of wild barley and wheat, mixing it with pulverised roots of plants, adding water and baking it.

“This is the earliest evidence we have for what we could really call a cuisine, in that it’s a mixed food product,” Professor Dorian Fuller of University College London says to BBC News. “They’ve got flatbreads, and they’ve got roasted gazelles and so forth, and that’s something they are then using to make a meal.”

The ancestral loaf was possibly used to wrap roasted meat, such as gazelle, which could also make this the oldest sandwich ever discovered. Scientists have noted that the bread would have resembled our modern-day flatbreads; a pitta bread or chapatti, whilst tasting much like our multi-grain breads.

An extended history
Despite bread being a staple of our diet for what we now know is an ever more extensive period of human history, very little is still known about the origins of bread-making.

Prior to this discovery, the unearthing of the 9,000-year-old Turkish loaf was founded, ad considered the oldest evidence of bread making. Scientists then analysed these under a microscope, the bread showing signs of various modern processes of bread-making, such as kneading, grinding and sieving.

The 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter site in the Black desert where the bread was located was known as Shunayqa One, in North-East Jordan. The site has previously been subject to extended expeditions and scientific investigations. Buildings containing fireplaces there were uncovered by British archaeologist Alison Betts in the 1990s, and since then the location has proven to be repeatedly blessed. Four more excavations were carried out at the site, between 2012 and 2015, where charred food was also discovered, along with animal bones, plant remains and ground stone tools.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


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