14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming
Breadcrumbs found at an excavation in Jordan reveal that humans were baking thousands of years earlier than previously believed. It may have even prompted them to settle down and plant cereals.
by Lina Zeldovich
Jul 24, 2018
3 minutes
When an archaeologist working on an excavation site in Jordan first swept up the tiny black particles scattered around an ancient fireplace, she had no idea they were going to change the history of food and agriculture.
Amaia Arranz-Otaegui is an archaeobotanist from the University of Copenhagen. She was collecting dinner leftovers of the Natufians, a hunter-gatherer tribe that lived in the area more than 14,000 years ago during the Epipaleolithic time — a period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.
Natufians were hunters, which one could clearly tell from the bones of gazelles,
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