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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, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:19PM (6 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:19PM (#708359) Journal

    It is probably fresher than the bread delivered to your grocery!

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:21PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:21PM (#708360)
      lol haaretz
      more juice owned media and now soydot is fallen
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:28PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:28PM (#708365)

        Prejudiced, much?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:29PM (#708366)

        >> Back to /pol/ >>

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:53PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:53PM (#708411)

      But but it's Organic Non-GMO All-Natural Handmade-in-small-batches Certified-Good !
      Who cares if something tastes like thousand-year-old fossilized charred cardboard, when it's So Good For You !

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:02PM (#708439)

      It is probably fresher than the bread delivered to your grocery!

      You jest, but my ex would serve any bread no matter how stale. :-/

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:46PM (#708484)

      It is probably fresher than the bread delivered to your grocery!

      Actually, I'm pretty sure that I have the world's oldest bread somewhere in the back of my pantry.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:43PM (21 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:43PM (#708370)

    The reason humans started eating wheat in the first place was that it grew wild in the Fertile Crescent. Making a simple flatbread from that would involve:
    1. Grinding the seeds. It's work, but you can do that with a couple of rocks if you really have to.
    2. Add water. They certainly know how to do that.
    3. Cook it on a flat rock. Also very doable with Stone Age technology.

    My guess as to why they'd do it is pretty obvious: Here's a plant growing all over the place that it seems like you might be able to eat, but you can't just chow down on the seeds because it's hard on your teeth. So you try to use what's readily available to make it easier. Stone Age people weren't much dumber than we are, and were certainly able to figure this kind of thing out.

    Agriculture could definitely be a later development of humans making an effort to ensure that they had enough wheat and other food plants nearby to still be eating well.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:48PM (12 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:48PM (#708371)

      Stone Age people weren't much dumber than we are

      Maybe smarter, on average. They didn't have political parties! Bread parties, beer parties, maybe cannabis parties, but no political parties!

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:54PM (11 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:54PM (#708373)

        They were probably a bit dumber than we are, if the Flynn Effect [wikipedia.org] is accurate. According to that, an average modern person is apparently much better than the average 19th century person at handling abstractions (e.g. "oaks are like grasses because they're both plants") and hypotheticals (e.g. "what if I planted an oak tree here?"). One of the reasons proposed for this is that modern people get much better nutrition than a 19th century person would, and by extension they'd get better nutrition than the average Stone Age person because a steady diet is a useful thing.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:02PM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:02PM (#708378) Journal

          We could wish that more Americans dieted steadily.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:44PM (5 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:44PM (#708408)

          While a steady diet is a good thing, and I'm pretty sure I've noticed Asians getting tall, faster than genetics should allow, as they embrace our rich food over traditional one, there is one minor issue with your statement. The South of Europe is littered with 2000 yr-old remnants of people who could look at a valley and abstract a gently-sloping 80-mile aqueduct going through a couple hills.
          The average person did not need to do that, but nothing tells us that they couldn't have, had they gone to school instead of helping on the farm.

          • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:40PM (4 children)

            by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:40PM (#708431)

            I didn't say they couldn't do it, I said that on average modern people are better at it. Building Roman aqueducts takes 1 person with the idea, plus a relatively small number of people trained in the art of building arches and solving other engineering challenges, plus a lot of slaves with not a ton of training to do the heavy lifting.

            --
            The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
            • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:12PM (3 children)

              by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:12PM (#708445)

              > Building Roman aqueducts takes 1 person with the idea, plus a relatively small number of people trained in the art of building arches
              > and solving other engineering challenges, plus a lot of slaves with not a ton of training to do the heavy lifting.

              That is ... quite an understatement.
              Even if I gave you access to Google topo maps, laser sights, and modern power tools, could you build me a stone-and-concrete conduit that goes tens of feet down over a run of tens of miles, through extremely varied footing through hills and valleys? Finding the path that works, then planning and executing with the resources you have requires a lot more abstract thinking than you seem to imply. You're totally Dunning-Krugering.
              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct [wikipedia.org]

              • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:19PM

                by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:19PM (#708449)

                What I'm saying is you need 1 person with the skills of a grand architect to lead the project, a few hundred people with significant engineering chops, and a lot of grunts. Since the Flynn Effect deals with averages, the Romans had enough smart people to make that work. Sure, the Roman engineers did a great job of it, since a lot of their stuff is still there, but it's not like the ancient Romans were a society of geniuses or anything of the sort. Mostly, they were into the same sorts of things we're into: sex, violence, drugs, and their version of rock 'n' roll, in approximately that order.

                --
                The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
              • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:22PM (1 child)

                by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:22PM (#708452) Journal

                You're totally Dunning-Krugering.

                No need to be nasty. That's basically implying the GP is an idiot, which is certainly not the case (based on other posts I've read from that username). Yes, building an aqueduct to Roman specifications is hard work and requires all sorts of engineering challenges, but Romans did find ways to standardize the process. And some of their engineering was a much more rudimentary way of doing things that we'd do today -- because they did not have the technical understanding, let alone the technology, to do it our way -- which led to some odd and inefficient design choices that paradoxically make the structures look more impressive to us today. But GP is right that if you have expendable slaves whose lives don't matter, you can do very inefficient things (because you can just conquer yet another neighboring tribe and enslave them).

                So, basically GP is more-or-less correct. Yes, you need some highly trained engineers who can do the planning, but most of it after that depends on slave labor.

                And you're basically doing the exact opposite of GP. Your previous post basically speculated that because some smart dudes in Rome existed who could plan and solve major engineering challenges that the average Roman pleb could do the same if he just went to school. There's no evidence of that either. Just as today's engineers are a bit above-average intelligence generally, so they probably were in ancient Rome too.

                • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:41PM

                  by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:41PM (#708481)

                  I'm not being nasty, just pointing out that the problem is multiple orders of magnitude more complex than was described. The fact that some still stand today is a testament to the fact that they just didn't whip an infinite resource of slaves into stacking stones across hillsides and river beds, and luckily didn't get them to settle the wrong way while going at a 0.1% grade for tens of miles, from bridges to tunnels, again and again.

                  And I see no reason to posit that the average Roman could not be trained to the same abstraction levels as the average modern person. There is no question that both the formal education, and the home from-birth exposure and environment would have to match to even stand a chance at measuring that, so it couldn't happen without a time machine. But assuming that it couldn't be true is pretty silly. I'm annoyed at anyone thinking that we are special. Taller, better equipped, and standing on the shoulders of centuries of discoveries, but not special. Heck, the Greek philosophers even knew how to be less boring than ours :)

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:58PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:58PM (#708413) Journal

          Better diets, less malnutrition. And now Internet access or dead tree libraries allow exposure to abstract concepts, math, and other aspects of mankind's collective knowledge from a very early age... or watch people play video games on Twitch.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:04PM (1 child)

          by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:04PM (#708491) Journal

          I'd be very cautious about making such a sweeping generalization about intelligence. We don't entirely agree on what intelligence is, let alone how to measure it. We use the IQ tests we have for lack of better measures, but there are several issues with them. They're heavy on mathematics, and they probably have cultural biases. Among many other things, they don't test for ability to discern what others are thinking and feeling, no "emotional quotient".

          I find the results of trying to create AI to play chess most instructive. Chess was seized upon as an easy way to measure intelligence. Good chess players are smart. (However the converse is not true-- there are many smart people who suck at chess.) And so we tried for decades to make computers play chess well, on the idea that if we could do that, we would have successfully created general AI. And then, when computers finally did get so good at chess no human could beat them any more, the manner in which they succeeded at chess served to show the game is not such a good measure of intelligence as was thought. The computer chess champ was hardly more than a very, very fast brute force searcher through billions of possible chess moves.

          An explanation for the Flynn effect is adaptability. If anything is adaptable, capable of learning new things, it's the young. We're constantly tweaking education, and it surely would be tweaked in directions that would help children on those tests. Those tests represent what we think intelligence is about, and therefore are a prime tool-- more than a tool, an objective in themselves-- for measuring how our education is working. Give them different tests, perhaps some sort of test of scout/wilderness savvy that would be vital to a Stone Age human, and they would probably fail spectacularly.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:13PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:13PM (#708543)

            Exactly! IQ tests suggest that African Americans are on average 20 points less intelligent than anglo-Americans, but that has been proven entirely due to cultural appropriation factors. If you add 20 points to their score, their results are identical. If you add 30 points, they are even smarter (on average).

        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:04AM

          by Bot (3902) on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:04AM (#708712) Journal

          > the average 19th century person
          AKA a meatbag out of the industrial revolution, which needed and trained slaves. All the same, IIRC John Taylor Gatto discussed the writings of a 9 year old miner in his essay about american education, archive.org is your friend.

          --
          Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:49PM (7 children)

      by looorg (578) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:49PM (#708410)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:51PM (#708435)

        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

        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.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:50PM

        by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:50PM (#708464)

        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)

        by DutchUncle (5370) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:10PM (#708470)

        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)

          by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:33PM (#708553)

          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

            by Arik (4543) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:47PM (#708558) Journal
            You're all sort of right but I'm going to chime in cause I think you're all missing the same facet of this, an important facet.

            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

        by Bot (3902) on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:06AM (#708714) Journal

        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)

        --
        Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:59PM (1 child)

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:59PM (#708377) Homepage Journal

    What does it taste like? Inquiring minds want to know!

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by RS3 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:09PM

      by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:09PM (#708418)

      A little stale, but pop it in the microwave for a few seconds and you're good to go.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:25PM (6 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:25PM (#708422) Journal

    "Flatbread" says "tortilla" to me. TFA guesses the flatbread in question was unleavened, so "tortilla" or "cake," as in, "pancake," are pretty reasonable alternatives.

    Agriculture is in no way a prerequisite for making flatbread, tortillas, or pancakes. People all over the world made those things using wild grains of all kinds for a very long time, so long we can't actually establish exactly when they started doing it. For example, people in MesoAmerica used maize and cassava to do it. Indians in North America used cattails, acorns, and ragweed, among other things.

    I reckon people then processed the source material into flatbreads because it lends itself better to portability and storage (hauling your heavy mortar and pestle everywhere is a pain in the neck.) But that's pure speculation because the people who started doing it then had not yet discovered the joys of journaling to tell us why they did it, or how jealous their neighbor Bob was when he tried our flatbread invention, etc.

    It's so widely known among archaeologists and others who study this kind of thing that this "discovery" doesn't seem to warrant an announcement. Publish, or perish, I guess.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:31PM (#708423)

      Bread was an American soft rock band from Los Angeles, California. They placed 13 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1970 and 1977.

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:45PM (4 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:45PM (#708433)

      The modern version of unleavened bread, so helpfully kept around for a few millenia, is matzoh. But yes, I'm sure we're talking relatively simple stuff here.

      However, I should also point out that the Meso-Americans who were using maize cultivated that plant, deliberately cross-bred it, and slowly turned it into what it is today. Its very existence is a triumph of genetic engineering.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:47PM (3 children)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:47PM (#708514) Journal

        Meso-Americans who were using maize cultivated that plant, deliberately cross-bred it, and slowly turned it into what it is today. Its very existence is a triumph of genetic engineering.

        It deserves to be held up as one of the best examples of human genius, bigger than the pyramids. I think I read once domestication of maize is responsible for feeding a billion people around the world.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:37PM (2 children)

          by Arik (4543) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:37PM (#708555) Journal
          And yet also of human failings. They figured out thousands of years ago that it needs to be nixtamlized, and served alongside beans, to reach its full potential as food. Yet today many people don't know or care, and eat it in a form more suitable for cattle.
          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:56AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:56AM (#708671)

            High fructose corn syrup?

            • (Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:06AM

              by Arik (4543) on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:06AM (#708674) Journal
              Is probably no better for cattle than humans?
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:20PM

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:20PM (#708451) Journal
    They always try to make these things sound unexpected. In order to get more clicks, I suppose.

    14.5kya in an area reaching from Jericho north into todays Turkey is exactly where the earliest food crop activity is expected. Whether you want to call it agriculture or not is splitting hairs. They were semi-sedentary, scattering particularly valuable seeds in the most opportune spots they could find then coming back to harvest them. What do you think they were doing with them after harvest, if not making bread to eat?

    The most interesting thing is how closely this bread matches the hasty bread from the Bible, thousands of years later.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:25PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:25PM (#708454) Journal

    Is it gluten free?

    *ducks*

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:13AM (#708604)

    And in another 14,500 years they'll find our Twinkies. And still editable.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:46AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:46AM (#708648)

    I still have an uneaten burrito I got from a 7-11 in the late 70s.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:08AM

      by Bot (3902) on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:08AM (#708716) Journal

      meatbags: when you proudly eat food that not even mice will touch.

      --
      Account abandoned.
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