SUBSISTENCE × TECHNOLOGY

The Oldest Bread

~14,400 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Shubayqa 1 is a Natufian settlement in the basalt desert of north-eastern Jordan, occupied on and off between about 14,600 and 12,000 years ago. Twenty-four charred lumps of food recovered there were studied under the scanning electron microscope. Such lumps keep the microscopic structure of what they were made from and of the way they were cooked, so their composition, that structure and a comparison with food prepared and charred on purpose in the laboratory can tell a baked dough from a boiled porridge. The remains turned out to be flat bread-like products, made from wild einkorn and other wild cereals together with tubers of club-rush, a sedge of marshy ground. The oldest go back about 14,400 years.

Why it matters

Bread came before the fields that later supplied it, by at least four thousand years, which takes it off the list of things agriculture made possible. The same study holds back the obvious next step. Cereals were a minor part of Natufian plant food, more than ninety per cent of which came from species that never became crops, so bread at this date was an occasional dish rather than a daily one, and its authors conclude that cereal meals became staples only once farming was firmly established.

Dating & uncertainty

Twenty-seven accelerator radiocarbon dates place the occupation between about 14,600 and 12,000 years ago; the bread fragments come from its early phase, which gives the figure of about 14,400 years. The margin is a century or two, and the claim does not rest on it: even the youngest reading would leave bread several millennia older than the first cultivated fields. What the dates do settle is a matter of geography, since they show the Natufian appearing as early in the eastern desert as in the Mediterranean woodland long treated as its core area.

Sources

1. Arranz-Otaegui et al. (2018), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordandoi:10.1073/pnas.1801071115
2. Richter et al. (2017), Scientific Reports · High Resolution AMS Dates from Shubayqa 1, northeast Jordan Reveal Complex Origins of Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levantdoi:10.1038/s41598-017-17096-5
3. González Carretero et al. (2017), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany · A methodological approach to the study of archaeological cereal meals: a case study at Çatalhöyük East (Turkey)doi:10.1007/s00334-017-0602-6
4. Arranz-Otaegui et al. (2018), Quaternary Science Reviews · "Founder crops" v. wild plants: Assessing the plant-based diet of the last hunter-gatherers in southwest Asiadoi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.02.011

Our species’ history as one day

22:54:101 h 6 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day