Flatbread

Charred bread remains at Shubayqa 1 in Jordan date to about 14,400 years ago. That is some 4,000 years before farming began.

Context

The remains come from Shubayqa 1, a hunter-gatherer camp of the Natufian culture in the Black Desert of north-eastern Jordan. The camp has two buildings with stone fireplaces, and the bread was found among hundreds of charred food remains there. Researchers studied 24 of them, using scanning electron microscopy to see their internal structure.

The study, led by Amaia Arranz-Otaegui and Tobias Richter, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2018. It found that wild cereals, including relatives of barley, einkorn and oats, had been dehusked, ground, sieved and kneaded, then cooked as flat, unleavened breads.

The finding matters because farming only began some 4,000 years later. The authors suggest that the labour of making bread may have encouraged people to cultivate cereals. Earlier traces of ground wild starch on stone tools are older, but this is the oldest direct evidence of baked bread itself.

Archaeologists caution that the remains are charred fragments, so how the bread looked and tasted is inferred from their texture and ingredients. The age is a radiocarbon-based estimate for the site, so it has a margin of error.