First Bread in History, the Sensational Discovery: It’s 14,000 Years Old

The oldest bread in the world, or rather the first bread in history , would have been baked just over 14 thousand years ago. This was stated by a group of archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen, as reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A burnt flatbread of unleavened bread was in fact found in the Black Desert of Jordan, in an area where there were fires where food was cooked.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A FOCACCIA

The discovery of this ancient bread has a profound meaning. It shows that bread-based foods were produced even before the advent of agriculture, which occurred at least 4,000 years later. According to researchers, that first bread would have been produced by the Natufians, a population of hunters from the East who had begun to experiment with a less nomadic and more stable lifestyle.

Two main ingredients: cereals and tubers . A food apparently considered almost a luxury and therefore destined for particularly important guests. Scientists have recovered hundreds of burned fragments, analyzing some of them with the electronic microscope to carefully identify microstructures and particles.

What will be the next step at this point? Amaia Arranz Otaegui, an archaeobotanist at the University of Copenhagen, explained: “To assess whether the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of cultivation.”

THE FIRST BREAD, HERE’S WHERE IT WAS DISCOVERED

The discovery of the first bread in history took place precisely in the archaeological site Shubayqa 1 , in north-eastern Jordan. The University of Copenhagen carried out an excavation campaign in that area between 2012 and 2015, also recovering traces of plants and stone tools. Previously, remains of baked bread dating back to 9,000 years ago had been found in Turkey.