Scientists have discovered the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date - charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers over 14,000 years ago - a finding which shows that baking predates the advent of agriculture.
It was previously thought that Stone Age (Neolithic) people could have been the first to make bread about 9,000 years ago in Turkey.
Findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 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.
The study by researchers from University of Copenhagen in Denmark and University of Cambridge in the UK provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread.
Researchers analysed charred food remains from a 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter-gatherer site, known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in north-eastern Jordan.
The site, which was initially found and briefly dug up by British archaeologist Alison Betts in the 1990s, consists of two well preserved buildings, each containing a stone fireplace of a large circular structure.
Archaeologists identified charred food remains along with chipped stones, ground stone tools, animal bones and plant remains.
"Bread involves labour intensive processing which includes dehusking, grinding of cereals and kneading and baking," said Dorian Fuller, a professor at University College London (UCL) in the UK.
"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," said Fuller.
The 24 remains analysed in this study show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as barley, einkorn, and oat had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to cooking.
"The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey," said Amaia Arranz Otaegui, from the University of Copenhagen.
"So we now know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming. The next step is to evaluate if the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation and domestication at all," she said.
"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 Tobias Richter, from University of Copenhagen.
"Flint sickle blades as well as ground stone tools found at Natufian sites in the Levant have long led archaeologists to suspect that people had begun to exploit plants in a different and perhaps more effective way," said Richter.
"But the flat bread found at Shubayqa 1 is the earliest evidence of bread making recovered so far, and it shows that baking was invented before we had plant cultivation, said who led the excavations at Shubayqa 1, Jordan," he said.
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