A slice of history! Bread from 14,000 years ago discovered

EXPERTS are toasting the discovery of the oldest bread in the world.

The 14,400-year-old charred crumbs found in a Middle Eastern desert were made using wild wheat, barley and oats.

The findings show humans made bread from wild seeds long before we started growing crops some 4,000 years later.

The researchers who found the crumbs believe that early bread-making may have encouraged man to begin cereal cultivation.

The discovery, reported in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, was made at an archaeological site in the Black Desert of north-eastern Jordan. There, scientists, including some from Britain uncovered two well-preserved buildings, each containing a circular stone fireplace within which the crumbs were found. When they analysed 24 crumbs of the flatbread under an electron microscope, they found signs of grinding, sieving and kneading.

The site was occupied by the Natufian people 14,400 years ago. Previously, the oldest evidence of bread making had come from a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site at Catalhoyuk in Turkey. The new discovery is also the earliest evidence of baking.