The world’s oldest bread
For years, historians and archaeologists have believed our ancestors began baking bread only after they started farming wheat. But the discovery of a few blackened bread crumbs in Jordan suggests the reverse may be true: that early humans developed farming as a way to produce more bread. The crumbs, found in sediment samples in what was once a dwelling or ceremonial building, date back 14,400 years—about 4,000 years before the earliest evidence of agriculture. “Our work shows that bread was not a product of settled, complex societies but of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society,” study author Amaia Arranz Otaegui tells The Washington Post. The ancient people who built the structure, the hunter-gatherer Natufians, wouldn’t have had the pita-like bread every day; collecting enough wild grains to be ground down into flour would have been a long and arduous process. But Arranz Otaegui says if bread was “desirable or much sought after,” it may eventually have helped spur the dawn of agriculture.
or colorectal cancer. Of these, 258 used at least one complementary medicine, such as homeopathy, Chinese herbal medicine, or naturopathy. While all the participants were using at least one conventional cancer treatment at the start of the study, 53 percent of the alternative-medicine users subsequently declined a course of radiotherapy, 34 percent refused chemotherapy, and 7 percent rejected surgery. The impact on their health was significant. Only 82 percent survived the disease after five years, compared with 87 percent of those who stuck to standard care. Overall, the alternative-medicine users were almost twice as likely to die over the 10-year study period. “There is a great deal of confusion about the role of complementary therapies,” lead author Skyler Johnson tells ScienceDaily .com. “[These findings] should give providers and patients pause.”
30 percent slower than that in a placebo group. Experts caution that more extensive trials of BAN2401 are needed. “It’s encouraging,” says Julie Schneider, a professor of pathology at Rush Medical College, “but I personally think there is a lot more work to be done.”