New Scientist
Image: Alexis Pantos
A trail of ancient bread crumbs has helped archaeologists put the origins of bread making in the Stone Age. The find provides the first direct evidence that humans were baking with wheat and oats thousands of years before they began farming the cereals.
Bread has been an important staple food for millennia. Stale loaves of bread dating back 3500 years have turned up in Ancient Egyptian tombs, and there are domed ovens that might have been used for baking at a 9000-year-old early farming settlement called Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Go back earlier in time, though, and the evidence for bread dries up.
This is why the discoveries at Shubayqa 1 are potentially so important, says Amaia Arranz-Otaegui at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The site lies in northeastern Jordan and it dates back 14,400 years – a time when Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the Near East were beginning to settle down in near-permanent settlements but a few millennia before farming took off in the region. Read more on newscientist.com…
