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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the knead-to-know-information dept.

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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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:35PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:35PM (#708459) Journal

    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.

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