World's oldest bread is over 14,000 years old and predates farming
SCIENCE
Michael Irving
2 hours ago
It may not be the most exciting food, but bread is one of the most important, and now its place in history may be even more crucial than we thought. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest direct evidence of bread ever found, dating back over 14,000 years. Not only is that several thousand years older than previous evidence of bread-making, it predates farming, leading researchers to suggest that the realization that cereals can be cultivated might have helped humans transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Traces of starch grains have been found on grinding stones as old as 30,000 years, but that doesn't necessarily mean prehistoric humans were baking bread. This latest discovery is the earliest empirical evidence of the practice, found in a 14,400-year-old archaeological site known as Shubayqa 1, in the Black Desert of Jordan.
Home to Natufian hunter-gatherers, the site consists of two buildings that each house a stone fireplace. Excavations between 2012 and 2015 uncovered charred food remains in those fireplaces, along with stone tools, animal bones and plant remains.
In the new study, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Cambridge and University College London, analyzed the tiny charred traces using scanning electron microscopy, and found clear signatures of bread-making.
More:
https://newatlas.com/worlds-oldest-bread/55484/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks!
Can't be true! 
Yeah, riiiiight, bread twice as old as the Bible says the Earth is....probably evolved bread from a rock too...
In reality, it IS a cool read....recommended!
Archaeologists find world's oldest bread and new evidence of sophisticated cooking dating back 14,000 years
Discovery may represent profound change in human eating practices, away from purely nutritionally utilitarian and towards a more culturally, socially and perhaps ideologically determined culinary tradition
David Keys Archaeology Correspondent
@davidmkeys
9 hours ago
Early "haute cuisine" is thousands of years older than previously thought.
Archaeologists have discovered what appears to be the birth of sophisticated cooking – at a Stone Age site in the Middle East, dating back some 14,400 years.
Until around that time, it is likely that food was primarily consumed for nutritional purposes. Throughout most of prehistory, food gathering and processing appears to have been carried out in order to ensure that food consumption was safe and provided more energy than it cost people to make. It was essentially carried out to produce a net energy gain.
But now, archaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest bread – that was cooked and probably eaten in what appears to have been some sort of ultra-early ceremonial or religious complex.
More:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/bread-history-cooking-stone-age-middle-east-archaeology-discovery-a8450276.html
Can’t get good craftsmanship anymore, that’s for sure.
