14,000 year-old bread discovered in Jordan

Stands of wild einkorn wheat ( T. boeoticum ) in the Karacadag mountain range. Picture taken by H. O ̈ zkan in early July 2004 

Someone burned the toast, apparently, and that's part of the reason that researchers still found bits of it in 14,400 year-old ovens in Shubayqa 1, a hunter-gatherer archaeological site in northeastern Jordan.  Headlines on July 16, 2018 described the study about the oldest bread known, led by Amaia Arranz-Otaegu from the University of Copenhagen. Turning most beliefs about agriculture and society on their heads,  it showed that our ancestors baked bread with einkorn, a wild wheat, thousands of years before the first cultivated fields.

Scientists already knew that people managed existing stands of einkorn (wheat) and many other plants, that they harvested and stored grains, that they ground grains, and that they made them into flat cakes that they cooked, long before they began to grow wheat in fields. Archaeologists have discovered grinding tools with grain fragments in Mozambique from 105,000 years ago; from Australia about 50,000 years ago; and from several places in Europe about 33,000 years ago. Shubayqa 1 is the first site, however, to have the burnt bread in the hearth.

Australian Aboriginal grindstone, about 30,000 years old.

Even Paleolithic hunters and gatherers had a good reason to go through the laborious process of harvesting grains and tubers, and preparing the bread. Grinding and cooking plants allows people to gain substantially more energy from them than from the raw ingredients.  Some archaeologists think that the bread discovered at Shubayqa 1, however, may have taken even more energy to make than it gave back in nutrition, in part because it was so hard to gather wild wheat seeds.

Professor Dorian Fuller at the Institute of Archaeology in London, a co-author of the report, said that the bakers might have intended the bread for religious ceremonies, which would justify the extra work. After all, the bread was in a well-made stone building with flat floors, built-in hearths, and other fragments of food from the long-ago feast. Dr. Fuller said, "This discovery . . . reveals that people . . . had begun to consume food for social, cultural, and potentially ideological reasons."

Dr. Fuller's hypothesis finds strands of support in other wheat-related discoveries in the Middle East. People had been cooking and eating wheat at least 23,000 years before the present, and nearly 10,000 years before the bread at Shubayqa 1. The earliest evidence so far (new discoveries are made every year) is from the Ohalo II site, about 23,000 years ago, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Charred seeds of emmer (another ancient form of wheat) were found in a settlement that contained six huts, six open air hearths, and a grave.

Three thousand years after Shubayqa 1, the first fields of cultivated grains were einkorn and emmer  discovered near the temples at Gobekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. Archaeologists there hypothesized that the hunter-gatherers who built them started planting wheat so that they could be close to their places of celebration and burials.

A modern version of Australian Aboriginal seed bread, from Gurandgi Munjie group.

Scanning electron microscopes allowed researchers to analyze 24 fragments of the several hundred pieces of bread. Most of them (75%) were made only from einkorn, further supporting the idea that the people of the area valued wheat above other grains. The gluten-rich seeds would make flatbreads that were 1/4 inch-thick, more delicate and perhaps better-tasting than those  made of oats, barley and ground tubers from sedges.

                                        Flat bread -- naan (TWC, 5-19-2012)

This bread was baked near the end of the Upper Paleolithic era, which started about 50,000 years ago and ended with the beginning of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. It suggests that the Paleo diet may need some revision.  How long now, until a recipe comes out for the "real" Paleo bread, and people can return to enjoying the food of their ancestors?

               The Shubayqa 1 site, with oven where researchers discovered ancient bread.

Traveling wheat -- The geographic range of wheat.

                                    Michigan wheat field, mid-July, 2013 [Photo, Micki Glueckert]

Wheat is a cultivated version of wild grasses. According to one site, it probably originated in Iran about 9,000 years ago when durum wheat crossed with wild goatgrass (Aegilops tauschii). Although many of the ancient variants of wheat, including emmer, einkorn, spelt, and Triticum are still consumed today, bread wheat, Triticum aestivum [Triticum from Latin for threshing, and aestivum, Latin for summer] is by far the most important.

The earliest evidence of people eating wheat is from the Ohalo II site, about 23,000 years ago, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Charred seeds of emmer were found in a settlement that contained six huts, six open air hearths, and a grave. Cultivated barley also has been found that dates to about 23,000 years ago; the two grains were often grown together.

Fast forward a dozen millenia to Gobekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey, where a site with carved pillars set on terrazzo floors caused great excitement among archaeologists when excavation began in 1994. Settlements of the people who built the pillars have remains of einkorn wheat. Five hundred years after the earliest work began at Gobekli Tepe, a village nearby had begun to domesticate wheat. Other sites in the Middle East, including Abu Hureyra I and II in Syria, Nevali Cori, and  Cafer Hoyuk also show evidence of cultivated einkorn  and emmer wheat starting as early as about 11,000 years ago. Because new sites are always being discovered, it is impossible to say for sure which site holds the honor of being "first." Within a thousand years or so, cultivated wheat appeared in a number of places in the Middle East -- Iraq, Iran, Persia, and more.

From there, wheat spread to China, Russia, Central Asia, much of Europe, and northern Africa and Egypt in the lands around the Mediterranean. It traveled over land, and by sea, in the holds of ships, and the bags carried by people seeking a better life in a new land.

By the time that the Roman Empire was at its peak, nearly a thousand years later (around 250 CE) it relied on Spain, Sicily, Sardinia, Egypt, and northern Africa, for most of its wheat. A Stanford web site (ORBIS) allows the viewer to enter variables like mode of transportation, time of the year, and costs and calculate how long it would take a kilogram of wheat to be carried from London to Constantinople, or elsewhere in the Empire. Empires of Food (Faser and Rimas) describes how the Romans fed themselves, and what happened when they finally could not, because of climate change, and political issues.

                                      Michigan chickens eating wheat. [Photo by Micki Glueckert]

As Europeans explored the Americas and Australia, they took wheat with them. Its range today goes from ". . . 260 m below sea level (Jordan Valley) up to 4,000 m (Tibetan plateau)." [Kew 2013]. Farmers cultivate it on every continent except Antarctica, with China and India being the largest producers. The United States is third, followed by France, Russia, Australia, Canada, Pakistan, Germany, and Turkey.






Map from Wheat Atlas, showing where wheat is grown. Note that much of the U.S. grows winter wheat, as does much of Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Russia. The "facultative" areas grow spring wheat that is sown in the fall rather than in the spring; all of them are moderately cold climates (small parts of Chile, China, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa).

Even if a particular area grows little if any wheat, much of the world's population depends on it as a major source of calories and protein. Graphic from Wheat Atlas.



 

                                   Michigan wheat field, mid-July 2013. [Photo, Micki Gluekert]

Wheat will grow in many environments, but prefers drier areas with ten to thirty inches of rain a year. In the United States, the Great Plains -- Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota,   and Eastern Washington state are the major places for amber waves of high-gluten bread wheat. Fields in Ohio and several Eastern states produce more of the low-gluten spring wheat for cakes and pastries.

          Wheat still rules in the Roman diet. Roman bakery, September 2013. [Photo, TW Carns]