Bread that precedes 4000 years of birth of agriculture

In an archeological site in northeastern Jordan, the burnt remains of a sort of old crushed bread, which some hunter-gatherers took 14,400 years ago

were discovered. found before today, which must be admitted before the advent of agriculture at least 4000 years old

This discovery authorizes the l & # 39; hypothesis that the production of bread-based bread wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers of the time (natural period) to grow wild cereals, thus contributing to the emergence of 39, agriculture and the Neolithic "revolution".

The team of researchers from the Universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge and University College London (UCL) badyzed the remains of charred food from the Natu-Shi site in Shubayqa, in the North Black Desert. is from Jordan.

The badyzes were then published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

"The presence of various charred foods in the chimneys of Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional discovery and offered the opportunity to characterize the feeding practices of 14 thousand years ago," says archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, of University of Copenhagen, lead author of the study. "The 24 remains badyzed show the wild ancestors of cereals such as barley, monococco and oats, which were ground, sieved and kneaded before being cooked in the form of a brew." kind of focaccia very similar to those found in Roman Neolithic sites in Europe and Turkey.

"We can now badert – continues the researcher – that products very similar to bread were obtained and were consumed by hunter-gatherers well before the development of agriculture. Now, it remains to be clarified definitively whether this production has really influenced the emergence of cultivation and domestication. "

" The Natufian hunter-gatherers are particularly interesting because they belong to a transitional period of humanity in which human groups became more sedentary and began to change their diet, "explains Tobias Richter, archaeologist from the same university. "The" sickle "shape of flint knives and stone tools found in the Levantine Naturist sites had already led us to think about how we refer to the plants of our ancestors, but the flatbread of Shubayqa 1 is certainly the first evidence of the existence of bread in antiquity and shows that cooking was a prior operation to growing plants.In other words, the early production of bread may have been one of the driving forces of the emergence of the agricultural revolution in which wild cereals were grown for more convenient foods. "

The remains of carbonized food were badyzed by electron microscopy in a laboratory at University College London by researcher Lara Gonzalez Carratero, an expert on prehistoric bread

"The identification of" bread "or other arch products made from cereals Carratero. Scanning electron microscopy was necessary to identify the microstructures and particles of each carbonized feed. "

" Bread requires intensive processing that includes grain grinding, kneading and cooking, and recognition of tiny charred fragments had to resort to high magnification, "says Donan Fuller, an archaeologist. UCL