A trail of ancient bread crumbs has helped archaeologists put the origins of bread making in the Stone Age. The find provides the first direct evidence that humans were baking with wheat and oats thousands of years before they began farming the cereals.
Bread has been an important staple food for millennia. have turned up in Ancient Egyptian tombs, and there are at a 9000-year-old early farming settlement called C抬atalho虉yu虉k in Turkey. Go back earlier in time, though, and the evidence for bread dries up.
This is why the discoveries at Shubayqa 1 are potentially so important, says Amaia Arranz-Otaegui at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The site lies in northeastern Jordan and it dates back 14,400 years 鈥� a time when Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the Near East were beginning to settle down in near-permanent settlements but a few millennia before farming took off in the region.
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At two ancient fireplaces within the site, Arranz-Otaegui and her colleagues found hundreds of pieces of charred food. Among them were 24 fragments, each about 6 millimetres across, with a bread-like porous structure. A closer look showed they contain the remains of cereals 鈥� wild barley, einkorn wheat and oats 鈥� and non-cereals including tubers.
鈥淲hen you see them, they look like the bread crumbs you may find in your toaster,鈥� says Arranz-Otaegui. Having compared them with chunks of ancient flat bread recovered from younger archaeological sites she says there is 鈥渧ery little doubt鈥� the fragments came from some sort of unleavened mixed-grain bread, possibly baked on hot stones near the fireplaces.
Stone Age bake-off
Arranz-Otaegui says the researchers are hoping to bake their own versions of the ancient bread soon to get a better idea of how they looked and tasted.
The ancient bread crumbs might have been left just before the people living at Shubayqa 1 abandoned the site. 鈥淭he fireplaces were full of plant and animal foods. It is possible they were preparing food for a journey,鈥� says Arranz-Otaegui. Bread, she points out, is not only nutritious but is also easy to transport 鈥� making it ideal for eating on the go.
Francesca Balossi at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, welcomes news of the discovery. Direct evidence that bread-making began so long ago will fit with other recent finds. 鈥淢ore and more sites are demonstrating that flour-like products were being made since 20,000 years ago,鈥� she says.
Anna Revedin at the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory in Florence has previously reported evidence that She thinks they may have used it to bake breads or as a soup ingredient.
Curiously, though, bread doesn鈥檛 seem to have become a staple food in the Stone Age. The latest archaeological evidence suggests the .
Perhaps that鈥檚 because bread was relatively labour-intensive for them to make, says Arranz-Otaegui 鈥� particularly if the cereals used to make the bread flour were rare in the local environment and time-consuming to gather. As such, bread might have been a luxury food, eaten on special occasions or during feasts.
Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, was the . 鈥淲e don鈥檛 get any real evidence for feasting before [this period],鈥� he says 鈥� but the practice became common at roughly the time that Shubayqa 1 was occupied. 鈥淭his is a good indication that bread and feasting are inter-related.鈥�
The climate changed at the end of the Stone Age and cereals became more common, says Arranz-Otaegui. This might provide part of the explanation for why humans began farming them, and why bread became a core component of human diets.
鈥淚magine that a plant that you consider a special treat suddenly becomes readily available,鈥� she says. 鈥淲hat do you do? Exploit it more often 鈥� transforming it from a luxury food to a staple.鈥�
