Hunter-gatherers used their loaf by baking bread 4,000 years before advent of farming

HUNTER-GATHERERS were baking bread thousands of years before the birth of farming, archaeologists have discovered after digging up the world’s oldest loaf.

The remains of a charred flatbread were found at an archaeological site in Jordan dating back 14,400 years by a European team of researchers including experts from University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge.

It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found, and it predates the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The team say the effort needed to produce bread from wild grains probably meant it was reserved for special occasions. “Bread involves labour-intensive processing which includes dehusking, grinding of cereals and kneading and baking,” said Prof Dorian Fuller, of the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

“That it was produced before farming methods suggests it was seen as special, and the desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the decision to begin to cultivate cereals.”

The bread was discovered at a hunter-gatherer site known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in north-eastern Jordan.

The people who lived there, known as Natufians, existed through the transition from hunter-gathering to farming and so are often studied by archaeologists hoping to understand when and why the switch occurred.

The remains analysed show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as barley, einkorn, and oats had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to cooking. Flint sickle blades as well as ground stone tools found at Natufian sites in the Levant have long led archaeologists to suspect that people had begun to use plants in new ways, rather than simply eating them raw.

But the flatbread found at Shubayqa 1 shows that baking was invented long before plants were cultivated. “The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey. So we now know that breadlike products were produced long before the development of farming,” said Amaia Arranz Otaegui, of the University of Copenhagen, the first author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.