The oldest bread in the world found on the prehistoric site in Jordan

WASHINGTON – Charred remains of a flat bread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone hearth of a site in northeastern Jordan have gave researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple, millennia before developing agriculture.

No matter how you cut it out, the detailed discovery on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean have gone through the cultural stage of bread making much earlier

Flatbread, probably unleavened and somewhat like pita bread, was prepared from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus parent , which had

It was made by a culture called Natufians, who had begun to adopt a sedentary rather than nomadic way of life, and was found in Bla. ck Archaeological Site of the Desert

"The presence of bread on a site of this age is exceptional," said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, postdoctoral researcher in Archaeobotany at the University of Copenhagen and senior author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Arranz-Otaegui has so far stated that the origin of bread has been badociated with the earliest agricultural societies that cultivated cereals and legumes. The oldest evidence of bread comes from a site dating back to 9100 years ago in Turkey.

"We must now badess whether there is a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture," Arranz-Otaegui said. "It is possible that bread has encouraged people to engage in culture and agriculture if it becomes a desirable or highly desirable food."

Tobias Richter, archaeologist and co-author of the University of Copenhagen's study on the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. "Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, and fiber," Richter said

. . The round chimneys, made of flat basalt stones and measuring about a meter in diameter, were located in the middle of the huts.

Arranz-Otaegui said that the researchers began trying to replicate the bread and were able to make flour from the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. "The taste of the tubers," says Arranz-Otaegui, "is quite gritty and salty, but it's a little sweet too."