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The discovery of flatbread remains from around 14,500 years ago in northeastern Jordan indicate that people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they were thought to have developed agriculture. The charred bread residue was found in a stone fireplace at an archeological site there.
Reuters : World's oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan
Haaretz : Archaeologists Find 14,400-year-old Pita in Jordan's Black Desert
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World's Oldest Bread Found at Prehistoric Site in Jordan
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It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails,
admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:49PM (7 children)
Still it is kind of interesting that someone back in the day came to the conclusions that you should/could crush seeds, add water, make paste/dough and then use heat to harden that into "bread" and eat that. I do wonder what the actual process was or if it was some happy accident when some sloppy caveman left some leftovers to close to the fire and figured the result was still pretty delicious.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:51PM
Probably something more like they didn't add enough water to the porridge.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:35PM
I see an AC already chimed in with the observation I was going to make. Or at least the gist of it, but I'll expand.
This is complete speculation, but I imagine the process might have gone like this:
Humans have been cooking for at least hundreds of thousands of years. Over the years, they likely found there were certainly kinds of plants, seeds, etc. that softened with cooking. And if you add water, they soften other things that are generally hard. You can take almost any grain (including whole wheat berries) and cook them in water to make a hearty porridge.
At that point, you only need someone to realize that crushing stuff makes it cook easier/faster. Then you get a smoother porridge too that's likely easier to eat. The most simple flatbread is basically a more dry form of cooked porridge. So, whether by accident or experimentation, somebody cooks some of that coarse meal in just a little water until it's dry and realizes, "hey, this is kinda okay."
Leavened bread too, I imagine, was likely an accident. Some lazy stone age dude mixes up a big vat of that meal paste/dough and dumps a little on a rock to cook it every day or whatever. But you let that mixture sit for a few days, and it starts bubbling. (Anyone who has made a sourdough starter from scratch at home knows this process... and lots of yeast and bacteria live grains...) Cook up some of that bubbling mixture, and you have leavened bread. Save a bit of the paste/dough/batter and keep using it, and it gets better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:50PM
I used to think it was more "happy accidents" but the more I've learned about the level of ingenuity "primitive" people displayed the more I believe someone actually made the connections between grinding the grains up, mixing the resulting powder with water, then cooking it for a food. Some type of basic flatbread exists in almost every ancient culture I've ever heard of.
Though I still think the origins of leavened breads would more likely have been accidents.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:10PM (2 children)
Crush/grind, add water: that's how herd animals eat grain. I'll bet it started as mush, someone heated up the mush and got porridge, and someone else left the porridge on too long and got knackebrot (or something like it).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:33PM (1 child)
I wonder if it started from mothers "pre-chewing" grains to feed young, not fully toothed children. It does not seem to me it would be a large leap from that to realizing the larger quantities of grains could be smashed or ground with rocks and soaked in water to soften them, and from there it would only be another small leap to realizing the process could be hastened even more by cooking.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:47PM
Cooking didn't originate in making food. Food was originally raw. Cooking began as a way to *preserve* foods we were already eating raw.
Today the average person has to spend relatively little time thinking about food preservation, what with fridges, supermarkets, and all that, but back in the days we are talking about it was a HUGE deal. If you killed an animal you needed to use all that meat very quickly or it would spoil. Fruit and green produce spoils almost as quickly, and occur in short seasons. So without food preservation it's feast and famine, for short periods of time you have more than you can possibly eat, then it all turns to poop and smells too bad to stay near and you have to find something else to eat quickly.
The word "pemmican' specifically refers to the historical north american concoction, but there's every reason to think the basic concept stretches back tens of millenium, and may consitute the beginning of cooking. And the purpose it served was primarily preservation, though we sometimes duplicate it today for taste. You take foodstuffs of various types - lean (trimmed) meat, dried berries and/or fruits, sometimes roots, sometimes seeds, depending on what's available. You grind it all up quite fine and cook it thoroughly so it's very dry and then you seal it in a package using rendered fat. It'll keep a long time that way, and it's very concentrated, so when you eat it, well, you *can* take a dry mouthfull and let your saliva soak in and chew and chew and chew and savor the flavor while you walk, sure. You can also settle down for a break, make a fire, boil a little water, and mix some of this into the water for a hearty soup.
If you're already making this stuff, and you have a year where you're overwhelmed with seeds, it doesn't seem a stretch to try and go directly to a hot seed porridge, and if it tastes crap cause you have no meat and berries to flavor it with, it gets left out in the baking sun of a near eastern summer all day, you come home and you have some hard bread.
And that bread, again, may not be gourmet but it will keep, if it's very well dried it will keep a long time, it can be chewed on while you walk, or you can crush it up and mix it in boiling water to make a porridge when you build your fire...
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:06AM
They started with: "hey slave, chomp these seeds for me and spit em here". (My AI is learning how to trigger meatbags, thx for the collaboration)
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