World's Oldest Bread in Jordan: Discovery Predates Agriculture

The world's oldest bread has been found at a prehistoric site in Jordan, dating back 14,400 years ago to an era that precedes agriculture, according to CNN.

While it may seem like stale news to some, what this means is that bread was being produced long before the development of farming and could have fueled the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period.

"The early and extremely time-consuming production of bread based on wild cereals may have been one of the key driving forces behind the later agricultural revolution where wild cereals were cultivated to provide more convenient sources of food," archaeologist Tobias Richter, who led the excavations, said in a statement.

The discovery was made at an old Natufian hunter-gatherer site known as Shubayqa 1, which is located in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan, where excavators dug up 24 charred bread remains.

These samples were analyzed by a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University College London and University of Cambridge, who published their findings Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prior to this discovery, the oldest known bread was recovered from a 9,500-year-old site in Turkey, were farming had already been developed, Gizmodo noted.

Richter explained that their team was interested in the Natufian hunter-gatherers as they lived through a transitional period when people became more sedentary and their diet began to change.

Professor Dorian Fuller from the UCL Institute of Archaeology noted that making bread in prehistoric times was labor intensive and, because it was produced before farming methods, it was probably considered to be special.

Which is why the desire to make more could likely have spurred the decision to begin to cultivate cereals.

The next step now is for researchers to evaluate if the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation and domestication at all, said University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, who is the first author of the study.

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