World's oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan has given researchers a delectable surprise: people started making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they developed agriculture .

No matter how you are slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of bread-making far more than previously known, more than 4,000 years before planting cultivation root.

The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic relative papyrus, which had been ground into flour.

It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archaeological site.

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

Arranz-Otaegui said until now the origins of bread had been associated with early farming societies that cultivated cereals and vegetables. The previous oldest evidence of bread came from a 9,100-year-old site in Turkey.

"We now have to assess whether there is a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture," Arranz-Otaegui said. "It is possible that bread can be provided for an incentive to grow and farm, if it has become a desirable or much-sought-after food."

University of Copenhagen archeologist and study co-author Tobias Richter pointed to the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. "B vitamins, iron and magnesium, and fiber," Richter said.

Abundant evidence from the site indicated the Natufians had a meat- and plant-based diet. The round floor fireplaces, made from flat basalt stones and measuring a yard (meter) in diameter, were located in the middle of huts.

Arranz-Otaegui said the researchers have begun the process of trying to reproduce the bread, and succeeded in making flour of the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. But it could have been an acquired taste.

"The taste of the tubers," Arranz-Otaegui said, "is quite gritty and salty. But it is a bit sweet as well. "