Bread, the oldest in the world was consumed 14 thousand years ago

Although, as calories, it is certainly not among the foods to prefer at the tables, it is indisputable that bread and its derivatives are loved and consumed in all corners of the world.

According to the most recent statistics, the sector as a whole, it is worth 137 billion euros, of which 73 thanks to bread, for a total production of more than 38 million tons.

And, of all the countries in the world, it is to European consumers that bread prefers: 64 kilograms is the annual consumption per capita.

On the continental scene, Germany, France, Italy and Britain have reached the top places for bread consumption, with the Italian who buys an average of 57 kg of baker's products each year, thus confirming his preference for white art.

Bread, moreover, is a very important food for our diet. It provides many carbohydrates (about 63 grams per 100 grams of product) that, when introduced into the body, are converted into glucose, which in turn is used as energy for the brain and muscles. The total absence of cholesterol makes it a suitable food to be inserted even in the diet of subjects with cardiovascular problems. It has great satiation power and is therefore able to reduce appetite.

That it is a very old food is not a novelty, but apparently it is much older than it was thought, so old as it is. 39, he was born before farming: hunter-gatherer groups already prepared it 14 400 years ago using wild cereals.

The discovery, published in the Journal of the US Academy of Sciences, is due to the collaboration between the British Universities of Cambridge and University College London with the Danish in Copenhagen

The group of Archaeologists made this astonishing discovery during excavations at a site in northern Jordan where Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived

. in the light of traces among the oldest of the Natufian culture: these communities have built small villages, used as base camps where the inhabitants, who are devoted to hunting and gathering on the territory, they return periodically [19659002] On the site, whose excavations began in the 1990s, there are two nested buildings, of different ages, dated to about 14,000 to 11,000 years ago. In the lower, the older, as well as many stone tools for grinding, a fireplace appeared whose contents, buried, remained intact after the last use: a kind of primordial bread in the substance.

More Specifically, researchers badyzed 24 remains of the world's oldest bread in the bowls found on the site, uncovering traces of barley, spelled and oatmeal: Seeds were harvested, sieved and kneaded before being cooked. It was a unleavened bread, similar to the one found in the more recent colonies, at the time of the Neolithic and Roman agricultural revolution

"The focaccia bread found at Shubayqa 1 is the first evidence of bread production. "So far discovered, and shows that cooking was invented before we had plant cultivation," said Tobias Richter, of the University of Copenhagen, who led the research. "It is possible that the early production of wild grain bread was one of the driving forces behind the agricultural revolution that followed, when wild cereals were grown to provide cheaper food"

. questions still to be solved: what role did this bread play in the diet of these prehistoric communities? Was it a regular food on the table or a rare concession?

"It remains to be seen if the production and consumption of wild cereal bread has influenced the appearance of the first domestic crops," observes the first author of the research, archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, from the University of Copenhagen.