Following a new trail of crumbs to the origins of agriculture

We are in mid-August 2013, and we are working in the dry heat of the Jordanian basalt desert of Harra. This is the last week of our second season of excavations at the Shubayqa 1 archeological site of 14,500 years old. We just finished exposing the stone floor of a Paleolithic house, and we are delighted – it took six weeks of excavations at this point. Our next goal is to reach a circular stone hearth, measuring about one meter in diameter, which is embedded in the building floor. A thorough search over the next two days is exciting team members' enthusiasm: We have unearthed tens of thousands of charred remains left in the ashes. This is an unprecedented discovery because the plant remains of this period in Southwest Asia are exceptionally rare. And discovering thousands in one place is an archaeobotanist's dream. We did not know that more in – depth analysis would reveal something even more shocking: we had discovered the first known breadcrumbs.

Bread is the most common staple in most parts of the world. is king. It is also one of the most diverse food products: each region produces its own varieties using pasta made from water mixed with wheat, rye, corn or others. common plant ingredients. Bread also has important cultural and even national connotations: what would France be without its wand and croissant? Denmark without its rugbrød (rye bread) and smørrebrød (open sandwiches)? The Arab world without pita? Each culture has developed its own types of bread which, in many cases, have become a culinary expression of identity. Baguettes, rye breads, tortillas, bagels, pitas, chapatis, focaccia, malooga (a flat bread found in Yemen), or nan if you live in Europe, the Americas, Africa or most regions of Asia, there is a good chance that you will eat bread every day.

Yet the origins of bread, and why and how it became such a popular and versatile staple, were wrapped in something of a mystery.

Although it is an intensive job, making simple bread is relatively simple: you only need water, flour and a suitable place to cook – something too simple that a hot and flat stone will work. Archaeologists have detected traces of starch on grinding tools dating from the Upper Palaeolithic (11,500-50,000 years ago) on a number of archaeological sites in modern Russia, Italy in Czech Republic and Israel. . Although some archaeologists believe that this means that humans started producing flour early enough, these tools could have been used to crush or pound starchy plants for other reasons, such as making oatmeal or porridge . Grinding tools are also quite rare in the Upper Paleolithic, so even if these tools were only used to make flour, it does not seem to have been a very common activity.

Most archaeologists put the beginning of bread making in the Neolithic era, which began about 11,500 years ago in Southwest Asia. In the Fertile Crescent – an arch-shaped region extending from the Nile Valley across the Levant to Anatolia and Mesopotamia – remnants of charred plants from archaeological sites, as well as grinding tools Abundant, flint blades and warehouses suggest cultivating wild wheat, rye and barley, as well as legumes. But what they have produced from these plants has also been the subject of lengthy debate. Some archaeologists assume that it was bread, but other suggestions include porridge or beer.

Read more: The ancient grain reveals the development of the first cities

Conclusive evidence has been hard to come by – until now.

Extending from Jebel Druze in southern Syria across eastern Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Black Desert takes its name from its vast fields of black basalt blocks, which are only occasionally interrupted by a Qa & # 39; (Arabic for a playa or mudflat) and wadis (a seasonal river). Archaeologists have long assumed that this semi-arid region played only a peripheral role in history. As a result, few scholars had examined this region in detail.

The only exception is the Australian archaeologist Alison Betts, whose pioneering research of archaeological sites in this region has found a number of settlements dating back to the Natoufian period. The Natufian, dated 11,700-15,000 years ago, is often described as an important cultural precursor of the Neolithic era. During the Natufian, the first stone houses, grinding tools and sickles of the world appeared in large numbers in the Levant, suggesting that hunter-gatherers included plants, including cereals, more frequently in their daily diet. Natufian hunter-gatherers were also more sedentary than previous Paleolithic societies, perhaps pushing them towards a path of no return to plant cultivation and agriculture

. Shubayqa 1, named after the Qa'a Shubayqa nearby. Although she briefly conducted excavations on this site, no other work was done at Shubayqa 1 until 2012, when our team from the University of Copenhagen launched a new a series of excavations that continued until 2015. Our work revealed two well-constructed circular buildings with paved stone floors dated between 11,700 and 14,500 years old, some of the earliest known buildings. It is here that we found a surprising cache of over 60,000 remains of charred plants. This discovery in itself was extraordinary because, with the exception of Tell Abu Hureyra, a site located on the Euphrates in modern Syria, the remains of plants are so rare at that time – often a handful or sometimes few hundreds. [19659004] The analysis of ancient plant remains is a long and laborious process: to begin with, samples of 10 or 20 liters of sediments must be collected from different archaeological sites and preferably dry-screened to identify the remains. more fragile. The remaining material is then passed through a "flotation tank" – essentially a drum filled with water with a water pump and a series of meshes and fine sieves. The sediment previously screened is loaded into a fine net attached to the top of the drum. The water is then pumped from the bottom of the barrel, dissolving the sediments. Light carbonized plant particles then float to the surface and are captured in a series of fine mesh screens at the top of the barrel. Once dried, the collected material must then be sorted under a microscope in different categories: charcoal, seeds, fruits, nuts, unidentifiable charred material and dirt.

Then the real work begins: the identification of different species of plant materials, separating, for example, wild domestic types of barley. To do this, archaeobotanists use a reference collection – a library of known carbonized seeds and other parts of plants – against which ancient material is compared using a standard microscope. We used the archeobotanical reference collection at the Institute of Archeology of University College London (UCL) to help us with our identifications because it is one of the best in the world. It turned out that it was a fortuitous decision.

Lara González Carretero is a Ph.D. student at UCL who is studying the archeobotanical remains of the important late Neolithic site Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey, dating back about 9,000 years. Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) – a powerful tool that has a resolution of up to 1 nanometer last year she discovered that many carbonized particles were previously grouped under the "non-identifiable" sediment category in Çatalhöyük's samples were in fact microscopic particles of bread and porridge. It was perhaps the oldest proof for bread. But at the same time, Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, the project's archeobotanist from the University of Copenhagen and co-author of this article, has scanned a microscope in the archaeobotany's laboratory. UCL and noticed a number of microscopic pieces of calcined materials. could not identify. So Arranz-Otaegui asked Carretero to take a look, and she was shocked when Carretero said, "Yes, that sounds like what I've got from Çatalhöyük." does he come? "

When Arranz-Otaegui told him that it was a 14,500-year-old hunter-gatherer site in Jordan, it's Carretero's turn to be stunned. The site was thousands of years older than Çatalhöyük.

With Carretero's supervisor, Dorian Fuller, we then proceeded to confirm this initial suspicion, using the methodology developed by Carretero for Çatalhöyük. two weeks, Carretero took hundreds of images with the SEM to compare the Shubayqa 1 samples with reference samples, and she confirmed that the charred particles of Shubayqa 1 were actually tiny pieces of bread. to be sure, we then invited another specialist , Monica Nicolaides Ramsey at the University of Cambridge, trying to extract the starch particles we had found. She found some starch, confirming our findings.

Read more: 5,000-year-old spur revealing the origins of corn

Ancient flour made from wild barley, spinach and oats

Our results , published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also allowed us to replenish the ingredients that went into this hunter-gatherer's bread. Bread manufacturers used ground flour from wild barley, maple and oats. But we also found an unexpected type of plant: tubers. Root tubers, an aquatic plant of the papyrus family (Cyperaceae), were frequently present in the archeobotanical assemblage of Shubayqa 1. These tubers were ground into flour, mixed with cereal flour, and probably cooked on a hot stone to produce a flat product. Jordan's hunter-gatherer bread was a multigrain and tuber bread – not necessarily what you might expect purely in terms of maximizing calories for the labor involved . (The remains of plants in the chimney also contained a surprisingly wide variety: tubers with herbs, seeds and fruits.)

What does this mean for our understanding of the processes that led to the Emergence of agricultural economies in South-West Asia? 10,000 years ago? The shift from the hunting and gathering lifestyle of the Paleolithic to the Neolithic agricultural economies has long been considered a fundamental step in the history of the world. Archaeologists have debated when, where and why this transition occurred, but given the long delays involved, the details were elusive. It can be argued that the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture was not, in the end, an economic or symbolic "revolution", as it has often been postulated, but rather a food revolution – a matter of taste. What has been lacking right up to here is a better understanding of what people were actually eating and how they were getting and doing their food.

With the discovery of bread at Shubayqa 1, we now know a little more about ancient food habits in Southwest Asia. But that just leads us to ask new questions. Was bread already a staple during the Natufian – or perhaps even earlier? Or was it a rare treatment? Have people fallen in love with bread, and has this sparked their interest in producing more flour, perhaps by encouraging them to start growing plants? What were the effects of bread making and its consumption on Natufian and Neolithic societies?

Thinking about the kind of foods that people have done in the past, how they got the necessary ingredients and in what contexts this food is consumed human perspective on past food cultures. It is amazing to think of people who were able to make bread long before cultivating; bread is not the product of a "civilized society", but perhaps a precursor.

So, next time you slip your toast into the toaster, pick up your croissant from the bakery, or dip nan in your curry. We thought of our Paleolithic ancestors who had the idea of ​​mixing the flours of different plants to produce your daily bread.

This work appeared on SAPIENS under CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Read the original here.