The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period. A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University College London and University of Cambridge have analysed charred food remains from a 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter-gatherer site—a site known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan. The site of Shubayqa 1 showing Structure 1 and one of the fireplaces (the oldest one) where the bread-like remains were discovered. Image copyright Alexis Pantos Image caption The fireplace where the bread was found at an archaeological site known as Shubayqa 1 
 
 This raises the intriguing possibility that growing cereals for bread may have been the driving force behind farming. "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." This would suggest that bread was transformed from a special occasion food to a daily staple when agriculture was more firmly established. "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.
– At least 4,000 years before the advent of farming, humans were baking bread. Two dozen charred crumbs found in hearths at an ancient hunter-gatherer site in northeastern Jordan have been identified as the world's oldest samples of bread—specifically, a 14,400-year-old flatbread made from wild cereals. That predates the next oldest sample found in Turkey by 5,000 years. Making bread from scratch—including grinding cereals—is labor intensive, note the researchers. "That it was produced before farming methods suggests it was seen as special, and the desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the decision to begin to cultivate cereals," says Dorian Fuller, one of a team of researchers who discovered the crumbs at the Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 in the Black Desert between 2012 and 2015, reports the Guardian. Described Monday in PNAS, the bread was likely made from wild wheat and barley flour, with ground tubers of a plant called club-rush adding a bitter, nutty flavor, reports the BBC. Combined with water, the mixture is believed to have been baked in ashes or on a hot stone and consumed as part of a feast of gazelle, water birds, and hare, remains of which were also found. Tasting a bit like modern multigrain bread, the flatbread might have even formed part of a meat sandwich. Noting "food remains have long been ignored in archaeology," researcher Amaia Arranz-Otaegui believes similar "bread-like cereal products" perhaps existed 25,000 years ago. Given this "exceptional find," she now hopes to explore how the Natufians' bread production influenced the later agricultural revolution. (Grape wine dates back a long way, too.)