WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they developed agriculture.

Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany, and Ali Shakaiteer, a local assistant to researchers working at an archeological site in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan, are seen collecting wheat in this image provided July 16, 2018. Joe Roe/Handout via REUTERS

No matter how you slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of bread-making far earlier than previously known, more than 4,000 years before plant cultivation took root.

The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.

It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archeological site.

“The presence of bread at a site of this age is exceptional,” said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany and lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Arranz-Otaegui said until now the origins of bread had been associated with early farming societies that cultivated cereals and legumes. The previous oldest evidence of bread came from a 9,100-year-old site in Turkey.

“We now have to assess whether there was a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture,” Arranz-Otaegui said. “It is possible that bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food.”

University of Copenhagen archeologist and study co-author Tobias Richter pointed to the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. “Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, as well as fiber,” Richter said.

Abundant evidence from the site indicated the Natufians had a meat- and plant-based diet. The round floor fireplaces, made from flat basalt stones and measuring about a yard (meter) in diameter, were located in the middle of huts.

Arranz-Otaegui said the researchers have begun the process of trying to reproduce the bread, and succeeded in making flour from the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. But it might have been an acquired taste.

“The taste of the tubers,” Arranz-Otaegui said, “is quite gritty and salty. But it is a bit sweet as well.”</s>Historians and archaeologists have traditionally linked bread to the dawn of agriculture, when people domesticated plants such as wheat, cultivated them and ground them into flour.

But a new discovery of blackened crumbs at an ancient stone building in the Middle East indicates that people were baking bread thousands of years earlier. Based on the radiocarbon dates of charred plants in nearby fireplaces, the food scraps are about 14,400 years old. That's about 4,000 years before agriculture emerged, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our work shows that bread was not a product of settled, complex societies but a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society,” said study author Amaia Arranz Otaegui, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.

Bread is an important food. Just look at a few of its many associations. We attach the word "bread" to the words "board," "basket," "crumb" and "winner." Bread gave English speakers the word “lord,” from the Old English word "hlafweard," which can be translated to "loaf-ward" (or, if you like, “keeper of the bread”).

Despite its few ingredients — flour, water and dry heat — bread is very nutritious. The finer the plant matter, the easier it is to digest and absorb nutrients, said Dolores Piperno, a Smithsonian Institution archaeobotanist who was not affiliated with this research.

Some ground and baked foods such as bread have become carbohydrate villains in modern diet advice books, including "paleo" diets that claim to mimic what our ancestors ate. But hunter-gatherers would have welcomed bread's ability to boost blood sugar. The people who built the ancient structure, members of what's called the Natufian culture, struggled in a “hostile environment to gain more energy from their food,” said Ehud Weiss, an archaeobotanist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who was not involved with the study.

Archaeologists found the bread remains in sediment samples at a site named Shubayqa 1 in Jordan. The structure was oval with a fireplace in the center, and its builders carefully laid stones into the ground. Arranz Otaegui said she did not know whether the building was a dwelling or had other, perhaps ceremonial, purposes.

Sifting through the sediment, Arranz Otaegui noticed samples she couldn't place at first; they were not seeds, nuts or charred wood. Instead, they looked just like the crumbs that accumulate at the bottom of a toaster. Study author and University College London graduate student Lara Gonzalez Carretero, using Natufian technology, has been experimentally re-creating the flour and dough. Pores in the samples mimicked the bubbles that appeared in the re-created bread.

“The main criteria on the identification of bread is its porous texture,” Arranz Otaegui said. “If we take other foodstuffs like porridge or gruel, we will see pieces of grain but not all these micro-pores.” She said the closest common bread to these crumbs might be a pita, but she also said the Natufian bread was probably unleavened, like matzoh or tortillas.

Archaeologists knew that hunter-gatherers in this region could grind and bake food, according to Weiss. “The Shubayqa breadlike find is, however, the first of its kind,” he said.

Cereal plants are high in calories. The traditional view was that early farmers domesticated those plants first, and then bakers began to turn cereals into bread. Study author Dorian Fuller, a professor of archaeobotany at University College London, said the discovery made him question “whether domestication was really driven by caloric necessity,” as has been claimed.

The Natufian people collected wild wheat and barley. An analysis of the starch in the crumbs revealed the presence of oats. But these ancient hunter-gatherers also ground a tuber called "club rush" into their bread. The tubers are “quite gritty and salty,” Arranz Otaegui said, but in experiments they were ground nicely into flour.

Piperno said that Arranz Otaegui and her colleagues were “justifiably cautious” in ascribing any sort of importance to this bread.

It was unclear to the study authors whether these breads were regularly eaten or occasional meals, or perhaps even luxury foods; other researchers have suggested that bread and beer were consumed during Natufian feasts.

From beer to bread and back again to solve ‘the world’s dumbest problem’

Another problem with cannibalism: Humans actually aren’t very filling</s>The world's oldest known bread was unearthed in Jordan recently, according to The Jerusalem Post. Made from wild grains such as barley, einkorn or oats, and also tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, the ingredients were ground into flour and made into a bread that was probably unleavened, a flatbread resembling modern-day pita bread.

What's important about this discovery is that the remains of the charred bread are more than 5,000 years older than the bread that last held the oldest-bread-ever-discovered title, found on a site in Turkey. That ancient bread was about 9,100 years old. The bread found in Jordan is about 14,500 years old.

The recently discovered bread made by a group called the Natufians was baked more than 4,000 years before cultures starting cultivating plants. A nomadic lifestyle doesn't lend itself to farming, but the Natufians seem to be one of the first to live a stay-in-one-place life.

This discovery poses some questions about the origins of agriculture. It was previously believed that bread came after people started cultivating plants. Now, it's more of a chicken-or-egg type question. Which came first, bread making or agriculture? Did farming lead to bread making? Or, did some culture, perhaps the Natufians, figure out how to make bread and upon the first bite feel the same way about bread that Oprah does?

Did the joy of bread inspire them to stay put and farm?

As anthropologists, archeologists, historians and food scientists try to figure out that answer, one thing is probably for sure. Someone is going to decide that since this is the oldest bread known to man, it's the purest, cleanest, most ancient form of eating. So, get ready for the Aquatic Papyrus Tuber Diet. Just wait and see.</s>LONDON-Scientists have discovered the earliest known evidence of bread-making, from a 14,000-year-old dig site.

The bake would have looked like a flatbread and tasted a bit like today’s multi-grain varieties, they say.

Our ancestors may have used the bread as a wrap for roasted meat. Thus, as well as being the oldest bread, it may also have been the oldest sandwich.

The find, from the Black Desert in Jordan, pushes back the first evidence for bread by more than 5,000 years.

The stone age bread-makers took flour made from wild wheat and barley, mix it with the pulverised roots of plants, added water, and then baked it.

The product would have looked like a flatbread and tasted a bit like today’s multi-grain bread, they say.

“This is the earliest evidence we have for what we could really call a cuisine, in that it’s a mixed food product,” Prof Dorian Fuller of University College London told BBC News.

“They’ve got flatbreads, and they’ve got roasted gazelle and so forth, and that’s something they are then using to make a meal.”

Bread has long been part of our staple diet. But little is known about the origins of bread-making. Until now, the oldest evidence of bread came from Turkey; those finds are 9,000 years old.

Scientists uncovered two buildings, each containing a large circular stone fireplace within which charred bread crumbs were found.

Analysed under the microscope, the bread samples showed tell-tale signs of grinding, sieving and kneading.

Dr Amaia Arranz-Otaegui of the University of Copenhagen, who discovered the remains of the bread, said it was the last thing they expected to find at the site.

“Bread is a powerful link between our past and present food cultures,” she said. “It connects us with our prehistoric ancestors.”

The bread would have been made in several stages, including “grinding cereals and club-rush tubers to obtain fine flour, mixing of flour with water to produce dough, and baking the dough in the hot ashes of a fireplace or in a hot flat-stone”, she explained.

The people living in the area at the time were hunter gatherers. They would have hunted gazelle and trapped smaller animals such as hares and birds.

They also foraged for plant foods such as nuts, fruits and wild cereals.

The researchers think the bread was made when people gathered together for a celebration or feast.

This happened before the advent of farming, when people started growing cereal crops and keeping animals.

This raises the intriguing possibility that growing cereals for bread may have been the driving force behind farming.

“The significance of this bread is that it shows investment of extra effort into making food that has mixed ingredients,” said Prof Fuller. “So, making some sort of a recipe, and that implies that bread played a special role for special occasions.

“That in turn suggests one of the possible motivations as to why people later chose to cultivate and domesticate wheat and barley, because wheat and barley were species that already had a special place in terms of special foods.”

The bread was unleavened and would have resembled a wrap, pitta bread or chapatti.

Researchers have tried to reconstruct the recipe in the lab. They say the mixed grains gave the bread a nutty flavour, much like today’s multi-grain loaves.

Lara González Carretero, from the UCL Institute of Archaeology, who is an expert on prehistoric bread, examined the 24 crumbs under an electron microscope.

“This would be a bread made of wild wheat and wild barley flour, mixed with water, and cooked on a hearth on a fireplace,” she said.

“There’s also the addition of wild tuber flour into it which gives a slightly nutty, bitter flavour to it.”</s>Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analyses from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.

WASHINGTON - Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they developed agriculture.



No matter how you slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of bread-making far earlier than previously known, more than 4,000 years before plant cultivation took root.





The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archeological site."The presence of bread at a site of this age is exceptional," said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany and lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Arranz-Otaegui said until now the origins of bread had been associated with early farming societies that cultivated cereals and legumes. The previous oldest evidence of bread came from a 9,100-year-old site in Turkey."We now have to assess whether there was a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture," Arranz-Otaegui said. "It is possible that bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food."University of Copenhagen archeologist and study co-author Tobias Richter pointed to the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. "Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, as well as fiber," Richter said.Abundant evidence from the site indicated the Natufians had a meat and plant-based diet. The round floor fireplaces, made from flat basalt stones and measuring about a meter in diameter, were located in the middle of huts.Arranz-Otaegui said the researchers have begun the process of trying to reproduce the bread, and succeeded in making flour from the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. But it might have been an acquired taste."The taste of the tubers," Arranz-Otaegui said, "is quite gritty and salty. But it is a bit sweet as well."</s>Archaeologists have discovered the burnt remains of a bread baked 14,400 years ago, more than 4,000 years before the advent of agriculture.

The findings, excavated in northeastern Jordan’s Black Desert, reveal the oldest direct evidence of bread and are discussed Monday in the journal PNAS. Twenty-four bread-like discoveries were found in two fireplaces in a Natufian hunter-gatherer site known as Shubayqa 1.

“The presence of hundreds of charred food remains in the fireplaces from Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional find, and it has given us the chance to characterize 14,000-year-old food practices,” said University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, the first author of the report, who is now on a dig in Iran.

“So now we know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming,” Otaegui said, adding that the bread production could have contributed to the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period.

The Epipaleolithic period bread was made of domesticated cereals and club-rush tubers, according to the study.

Otaegui said she tasted the tubers they used, and “they were a little sweet and a bit salty and had a gritty texture, but maybe that’s because we didn’t clean them well enough.”

Previously, evidence of bread production was found in late Neolithic sites in Turkey and the Netherlands. The charred remains in Jordan are the first direct evidence that bread production preceded agriculture.

“Natufian hunter-gatherers are of particular interest to us because they lived through a transitional period when people became more sedentary and their diet began to change,” said University of Copenhagen archaeologist Tobias Richter, who led the excavations.

The authors of the report noted that cereal-based foodstuffs were difficult to make. Hunter-gatherers may have considered them luxury foods “employed to impress invited guests and secure prestige for the hosts.”

“It is quite interesting,” said food technologist Antonella Pasqualone, who did not work on this study but as a professor at the University of Bari specializes in cereal science and technology, and who has written several studies on bread.

“Flat bread presents numerous advantages over ‘high’ and voluminous bread loaves, and in my opinion, a plausible hypothesis is that this kind of bread could be a perfect bridge between hunter-gatherers and stable farmers,” Pasqualone said.

Flat bread doesn’t need a large oven, but it “could be baked simply by covering by sand and embers or by laying down the dough on a metal or a terracotta plate placed on the fire,” she said. “Finally, flat breads could be easily transported with little encumbrance by stacking them on top of each other.”

“I think this offers a whole new perspective about the possibility of bread in this time period. The evidence is quite convincing,” said Patrick McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

McGovern, who was not involved in the study, also suspects that researchers might be seeing some evidence of beer making, but there would need to be more evidence. He’s written extensively about the art of ancient beer making in the books “Uncorking the Past” and “Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-created.”

He thinks it’s powerful to be able to look at the ancient past and see connections to today. “They are very similar people to us, but they don’t have the modern tools we do and may have been more in touch with the natural world,” McGovern said. “If you think about it, if you are only living to 20, you will be looking to your environment for anything that will extend your life, help your diet or cure disease. All these carbohydrate resources and herbs become very important.”

Otaegui said she hopes to work with some modern chefs to try to make the ancient recipe. “Bread is such an important staple, but it also has this additional powerful place in contemporary culture with links to religion and important ceremonies. Finding this link for us to the past and our ancestors was the last thing we expected to find, but it was a good surprise for sure.”</s>For the dilettante, laypeople who aren't obsessed with the science of baking, bread is pretty boring. But as the oldest bread discovered in the history of humanity attests, bread can be pretty fascinating when its unearthed from a hole in the ground after being buried for 14,000 years.

In fact, the remnants of this very old bread discovered in northeastern Jordan, predate the advent of the "Neolithic agricultural way of life," according to researchers, who published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists didn't dig up whole loaves of bread, but rather charred crumbs that were used to make "flatbread-like products" millennia ago.

University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui told CNN the crumbs were a momentous find: "So now we know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming," she said. In total, "Twenty-four bread-like discoveries were found in two fireplaces in a Natufian hunter-gatherer site known as Shubayqa 1," per CNN's report.</s>The scraps are believed to be about 14,400 years old — some 4,000 years before agriculture emerged, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The breadcrumbs were discovered at the Black Desert archeological site in north-eastern Jordan. It is believed a fireplace was used to bake the bread.

Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeology and lead author of the research, told Euronews the discovery "changes many things... we always believed bread was not a product of hunter-gatherers"

Historians have traditionally linked bread to the dawn of agriculture when people cultivated plants such as wheat and ground them into flour.

Arranz-Otaegu made the unexpected discovery in the lab while looking through her soil samples. She says she found the charred crumbs but could not tell what they were. Her colleague then looked at the samples and said: "It looks like bread."

They were both shocked as they realised they were holding evidence of oldest bread in the world.

The bread is believed to be made by a culture called the Natufians. The hunter-gatherers embraced a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle.

"We already knew the Natufians were complex, they started building with stone and made artistic manifestations. The production of bread adds to that, they started doing lots of things that were the start of everything really," Arranz-Otaegu said.

The bread would have resembled a flatbread such as a pitta and was made out of wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.

Arranz-Otaegu said there are now many more questions to ask, such as if the bread was a staple or specialty. She believes the latter.

Researchers have tried to reconstruct the recipe.

"We don't really know what it would have tasted like" but "the texture was gritty, a little bit salty, and a little sweet," Arranz-Otaegu said.

"I think it is something you could eat if you were open-minded."</s>Archaeologists have found the charred remains of bread crumbs in Jordan's Black Desert that are believed to be the oldest evidence of bread ever discovered.

The crumbs were found in two fireplaces. Through radiocarbon-dating, archaeologists concluded that the fireplaces were used over 14,000 years ago.

"Our finds provide empirical data to demonstrate that the preparation and consumption of bread-like products predated the emergence of agriculture by at least 4,000 years," the study's authors —

 Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, Lara Gonzalez Carretero, Monica N. Ramsey, Dorian Q. Fuller, and Tobias Richter — said.

"Bread has been seen as a product of agriculturist, settled societies, but our evidence from Jordan now basically predates the onset of plant cultivation ... by at least 3,000 years," said Richter, from the University of Copenhagen, noting that fully-fledged agriculture in the Levant is believed to have emerged around 8,000 BC, according to The Guardian.

"So bread was being made by hunter-gatherers before they started to cultivate any plants."

Prior to the discovery of the burnt crumbs, the oldest known evidence of bread was unearthed in Turkey. Those remnants of ancient bread were said to be 9,000 years old at the time they were found.

Some of the food remains from Jordan were made of wheat, rye, millets, oat, and barley. Some included noncereal components.

Professor Dorian Fuller of the University College London told the BBC that the bread crumbs found in Jordan double as the "earliest evidence we have for what we could really call a cuisine, in that it's a mixed food product."

The archaeologists believe that the bread would resemble the flatbreads that are widely eaten today.

The process of making the bread was said to have involved grinding up cereals and club-rush tubers first so that the bakers would have flour to use. They would have then taken the flour and mixed it together with water to create the dough, and the final stage of the bread-making process would have involved cooking the bread in hot ashes or on a flat stone placed inside the oven.

The ancient bread also could have tasted a bit nutty because of its multigrain composition, while the usage of the club-rush tubers would have imparted a slight, salty flavor, said Richter.

The archaeologists believe that the bread baked in the Jordan ovens was consumed during feasts or special rituals and they may have been eaten alongside different types of meat as well.</s>JORDAN — Archeologists have discovered the burnt remains of a flatbread baked 14,400 years ago, more than 4,000 years before the advent of agriculture.

The findings, excavated in northeastern Jordan’s Black Desert, reveal the oldest direct evidence of bread. Twenty four bread-like discoveries were found at two fireplaces in a Natufian hunter-gatherer site known as Shubayqa 1.

“The presence of hundreds of charred food remains in the fireplaces from Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional find, and it has given us the chance to characterize 14,000-year-old food practices,” said University of Copenhagen archeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, the first author of the report.

“So now we know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming,” said Otaegui, who added that the bread production could have contributed to the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period.

The Neolithic flatbread — known nowadays as pita or Arabic bread — was made of domesticated cereals and club-rush tubers, according to the study released on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Prior to these findings, evidence of bread production was found in late Neolithic sites in Turkey and the Netherlands. The charred remains in Jordan are the first direct evidence that bread production preceded agriculture.

“Natufian hunter-gatherers are of particular interest to us because they lived through a transitional period when people became more sedentary and their diet began to change,” said University of Copenhagen archeologist Tobias Richter, who led the excavations.

The authors of the report noted that cereal-based foodstuffs were difficult to make. Hunter-gatherers may have considered them luxury foods “employed to impress invited guests and secure prestige for the hosts.”
Archeologists in Jordan find baked flatbread dating to 12,500 BC, making it the oldest surviving bread ever discovered, surpassing a Turkish loaf which was estimated to be 9,100 years old. The bread was found in a stone oven which was apparently built during the formative years of the Natufian culture. The bread is also notable for predating the Neolithic Revolution by 4,000 years.