Photo: Serhat Cetinkaya/Anadolu/Getty Images.
A 8,600-year-old bread was found at the Neolithic archeological site at Cumra district in Konya, Turkey.
You never know what you’ll find once you start digging. That’s true for many kinds of knowledge — and of course, for archeological sites. Consider this site in Turkey and the world’s oldest piece of bread.
Vishwam Sankaran has an interesting report at the Independent.
“Archaeologists in Turkey have uncovered what could be the oldest known piece of fermented bread made by humans at a site dating back to around 6,600 BC.
“The piece of bread was discovered in Turkey’s central Anatolia in the ancient stone age site of Çatalhöyük – one of the largest and best-preserved remains of an early agrarian society around 8,600 years old. Researchers suspect the early human settlement in the Turkish province of Konya flourished between 6,700 to 6,500 BC. …
“Artifacts and structures uncovered at the site over the years suggest the residents of Çatalhöyük were pioneers of early farming, known to have cultivated wheat and barley as well as herding sheep and goats.
“The Unesco World Heritage site was one of the world’s first places of urbanization, accommodating over 8,000 people in its heyday between around 10,000 BC to 2,000 BC.”
For more details, listen to an audio at Public Radio International’s The World, here.
And at PNAS, here, you can read related research on the origins of bread. Amaia Arranz-Otaegui et al describe “the earliest empirical evidence for the preparation of bread-like products by Natufian hunter-gatherers, 4,000 years before the emergence of the Neolithic agricultural way of life. The discovery of charred food remains has allowed for the reconstruction of … the early production of bread-like products. [The] results suggest the use of the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals (e.g. wild einkorn) and club-rush tubers to produce flat bread-like products.”
So much for the Paleo diet. 😉 Bread making started early.
Humans have always been pretty ingenious when you think about it. Hard to imagine many of us modern people inventing bread all by ourselves!