Bread is anterior to agriculture for millennia: study

Historians and Archaeologists have Traditionally Linked Bread at the dawn of agriculture, when people domesticated plants such as wheat, cultivated them and floured them.

But a new discovery of blackened crumbs in an ancient stone building in the Middle East indicates that people were making bread thousands of years earlier. Based on radiocarbon dates of burned plants in nearby chimneys, food remains are around 14,400 years old. It's about 4000 years before the emergence of agriculture, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

"Our work shows that bread was not a product of sedentary and complex societies, but a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society," said study author Amaia Arranz Otaegui, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.

Despite its few ingredients – flour, water and dry heat – bread is very nutritious. The finer the plant material, the easier it is to digest and absorb nutrients, said Dolores Piperno, an archaeobotanist from the Smithsonian Institution who was not affiliated with this research.

Some ground and cooked foods such as bread have become nasty carbohydrates in modern diet board books, including "paleo" diets that purport to mimic what our ancestors ate. But hunter-gatherers would have appreciated the bread's ability to raise blood sugar. People who built the old structure, members of what is called Natufian culture, fought in a "hostile environment to get more energy from their food," Ehud Weiss said. , an archaeobotanist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. study.

Archaeologists found bread in sediment samples at a site named Shubayqa 1 in Jordan. The structure was oval with a chimney in the center, and its builders carefully laid stones in the ground. Arranz Otaegui said that she did not know if the building was a dwelling or had other purposes, perhaps ceremonial.

While sifting the sediments, Arranz Otaegui noticed samples that she could not place at the beginning; they were not seeds, nuts or charred wood. Instead, they looked like crumbs that accumulated at the bottom of a toaster. The author of the study, Lara Gonzalez Carretero, a graduate student of University College London, using Natufian technology, experimentally recreated flour and pulp. The pores in the samples mimicked the bubbles that appeared in the recreated bread.

"The main criterion for the identification of bread is its porous texture," said Arranz Otaegui. "If we take other foods like porridge or porridge, we'll see some pieces of cereal, but not all of these micro-pores."

She said that the closest common bread to these crumbs could be a pita, but she also said that the Natufian bread was probably unleavened, like matzoh or tortillas.

Archaeologists knew that hunter-gatherers in this area could grind and cook food, according to Weiss. "The discovery of Shubayqa bread is, however, the first of its kind," he said.

– Washington Post