Bread predates agriculture by 4,000 years, discover archaeologists

The charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers over 14,000 years ago has been discovered in north-eastern Jordan by a team of researchers from UCL, University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. Despite its importance in modern cuisine the origins of bread have until now been widely unknown. It was previously thought that Stone Age (Neolithic) people could have been the first to make bread about 9,000 years ago from the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. The findings, published today 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 results provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread. The UCL 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.