Archaeologists not unusual to find traces of crushed grain on grinding stones older than 30,000 years, but they do not attribute it to the technology of bread-making. Rather, the ancients split the solid grains, such as nuts, before eating. And the time of appearance of this bread, which will be the first step on the way to agriculture and a settled way of life, always changing. Recently a new record – 12 000 BC.
In the Black desert of Jordan, in the place called Subika-1, in the period 2012-2015 in the course of excavations was discovered huts netupsky hunter-gatherers, from which the other is distinguished by the presence of a stone hearth. And inside – the charred fragments of bones and plant remains. Recently, an international team of scientists has completed a detailed analysis of the 24 surviving fragments and came to the conclusion that this is the oldest bread crumbs in the world.
DNA analysis showed that oats, wheat and barley einkorn in the samples is the wild version of the modern grains, are not subject to selection. The grain was ground, sifted, mixed and kneaded from the dough before the thermal treatment. The result is very similar to the unleavened bread of Neolithic sites in southern Europe and Turkey. And this is another proof – people first learned to bake bread, and then appreciated the benefits of such a meal and it inspired them to start the cultivation of the land and to sow cereals.
Another indirect discovery – the process of making bread, from the small and solid grains of wild plants was much more difficult than modern cakes from flour. However, time-consuming work to give such a product, analogues to which in nature was not, but because such food has quickly become the privileged. And who manufactured the tribes got a chance to make a revolution, a breakthrough in its development. But this hypothesis requires more evidence than the scientists now.
Source — University of Copenhagen