Bread our ancestors relished 12,500 years ago recreated

Researchers have recreated a pre-historic bread that our ancestors savoured over 12,500 years ago, re-enacting a critical moment in human history that led to rise of civilisations.
Using 12,500-year-old conical mortars carved into bedrock, researchers reconstructed how our ancient ancestors processed wild barley to produce groat meals, as well as a delicacy that might be termed "proto-pita" - small loaves of coal-baked, unleavened bread.
In doing so, they re-enacted a critical moment in the rise of civilisation - the emergence of wild-grain-based nutrition, some 2,000 to 3,000 years before our hunter-gatherer forebears would establish the sedentary farming communities which were the hallmark of the "Neolithic Revolution".

The research team conducted their study in the Late Natufian site of Huzuq Musa, located in Israel.
Most investigators agree that cereal domestication was achieved about 10,500 years ago. The study shows how groat meals and fine flour were produced from wild barley, two to three millennia before the appearance of domesticated grains.
The team's field work resolved a long-standing mystery about thousands of cone-shaped hollows carved into the bedrock throughout the Southern Levant.

Assuming they were mortars used for the processing of plant food, the researchers decided to use these ancient stone tools, along with period-appropriate items such as wooden pestles, sticks and sieves, to reconstruct how the work was done, said Mordechai Kislev of Bar-Ilan University.

The experiment began by collecting the coated grains of a cereal ear from wild barley. The grains were then separated from the stalks, by beating them with a curved stick.
The conical mortars were filled with a measure of the raw grain and beaten with a wooden pestle, to make groats and flour, said team member Adiel Karty, explaining that the different-sized mortars served specific agricultural purposes.
The wider cones were used for removing the bristle that extends from the edge of the seed, while the narrower cones were used to remove grain husk, he explained.
"The Natufians invented a peeling-milling machine long before the invention of machinery!" he said.

After de-husking, the grain was scooped out of the conical mortar by hand then placed into a small cup cut in the nearby bedrock. It was transferred for filtering in a small-gauge sieve.
Ofer Bar-Yosef, from Harvard University, said that the study complements nearly 80 years of research suggesting that the Natufians, although subsisting as a hunter-gatherer society, used sickles to harvest wild, almost-ripe cereals, and were capable of producing large quantities of groat meals from roasted, half green barley grain.
Moreover, the technological advance from wide to narrow cone mortars represented a major dietary change, because de-husked flour made it possible to produce the fine flour needed for bread.

The study was published in the journal Plos One.