14 000 Year old Bread Oven ?

This is interesting a few thousand years before known agriculture ? Unleavened bread was being baked for the folks. In northern Jordan

Thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, people were already making bread. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study based on a curious find in northeastern Jordan. At its most basic, bread is the combination of processed cereal grains and water that have been baked, fried, or steamed. The process leaves behind telltale chemical and structural properties that researchers can use to identify the staple food. And that’s just what archaeologists found when they investigated a 14,000-year-old site known as Shubayqa 1 in Jordan’s Black Desert. The inhabitants, who were hunter-gatherers, left their home in a hurry, with the contents of their most recent meal still smoldering in two sunken fireplaces (one pictured). With the help of a scanning electron microscope, which uses a beam of electrons to return incredibly intricate zoomed-in images, the researchers identified 24 pieces of char that were decidedly breadlike. Though the bread’s exact grain remains unknown, its cellular structure resembles cereal grain species such as wild einkorn, rye, or millet, and it was likely an unleavened, flatbread. Some pieces incorporated root starches as well.

www.sciencemag.org... =bakebread-20447

Mhmmmm!

Organic bread!

This really is remarkable.
3-4,000 years before agriculture!

a reply to: skywatcher44


Every culture has a version of fried bread! Whether it is unleavened, deep fried, slammed against an oven wall, or topped with tomatoes, cheese, and pepperoni, seems like every culture worldwide loves fried bread in one form or another!

Or an MLT. Mutton-lettuce-tomato sandwich where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe!



That was a bunch of labor to go through to get bread! Seems each time we "think we know the past" the date keeps being pushed back as new discoveries are made. The list so far: first humans out of Africa, first fired pottery, first settlements in the Americas (??, I thought I saw that in the last year of two), and now bread! I am sure I am missing a few too!

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: skywatcher44


Every culture has a version of fried bread! Whether it is unleavened, deep fried, slammed against an oven wall, or topped with tomatoes, cheese, and pepperoni, seems like every culture worldwide loves fried bread in one form or another!

Or an MLT. Mutton-lettuce-tomato sandwich where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe!

That was a bunch of labor to go through to get bread! Seems each time we "think we know the past" the date keeps being pushed back as new discoveries are made. The list so far: first humans out of Africa, first fired pottery, first settlements in the Americas (??, I thought I saw that in the last year of two), and now bread! I am sure I am missing a few too!

Yea but this time they got it right for sure.... so you can safely consider it a fact...........Just like they know that some planet, circling some star hundreds of light years away, that they can not see..... is earthlike and in the sweet zone..... If a man in a suit tells you it's so...... then brother thats the way it is

originally posted by: IAMTAT
This really is remarkable.
3-4,000 years before agriculture!

You mean before what theyve "sold us" was the timeline

originally posted by: IAMTAT
This really is remarkable.
3-4,000 years before agriculture!

Before known......

I am sure that bread has been made by humans for a long long time. Bread made in a stone oven is good, so is pizza cooked in an open fire stone oven. They finally make that kind of stuff here locally, It beats the hell out of pizza cooked in a conventional oven. I should check one out and design and build one here, I have all sorts of cool rocks collected by previous people here to build it out of. They kind of liked to make things out of rock for some reason. I just got to make sure not to put the exploding kind too close to the fire itself.

a reply to: skywatcher44

For 14,000 years ago that looks rather intricate for nomad hunter gatherer who need to flee in a hurry, that looks like a well established-settlement-fire pit to me.
I'm thinking that fire pit was used for a long time and the remnants they found are either damaged from being over cooked or were found because that particular settlement might be really old and inhabited for a long time.
Either cool find. Love stuff like this!

a reply to: strongfp

Probably because it was well settled, and from the looks of it, fairly prosperous.

Most of the period this relates to is conjecture...the history changes as more facts are, well, unearthed.

This is a very cool, very remarkable find.

thank you OP stuff like this is what originally brought me to above top secret its nice to see stuff like this again

a reply to: seagull

Yes. I am thinking the stone laying is not 14,000 years old.

These guys need to start excavating the surrounding area this might be a bigger find than they know!

a reply to: skywatcher44

This suggests it was a well known and staple diet of those people WHOM we are told by academia were merely hunter gatherer's, yet if they were how long would the supply of WILD grain's have lasted in an area, my hunch is that they are totally wrong and agriculture was known long before the fertile crescent, perhaps in the turmoil at the end of the ice age most of that knowledge was lost but some must have survived and of course I have no problem with the importance of the fertile crescent to modern agriculture but it was most likely a re-discovery of agriculture in that region rather than a first discovery as we are most often told.

Were there is one bread oven there are usually more and this of course mean's demand for the grain would have been even higher, then there are all of those grinding stone's, wild un cultivated stock's of grain could never have sustained all of those grinding stone's and bread oven's so once again another indicator that earlier agriculture must have been available to provide the grain.

And were did the seed originate to start off the fertile crescent agricultural explosion anyway, was it all wild seed or was perhaps some at least of it from previous cultivated stock?.

S+F

If this is as old as claimed, there's no reason to not consider wild harvested grains could have been experimented with before agricultural establishment occurred. That's kind of how we figured out what to grow in the first place, we wouldn't have had anything preferred to plant and grow in larger amounts if we hadn't investigated the foods/ingredients at one point or another well before.

There's also no reason to not postulate they were smart enough to have established "rest stops" of sorts. Just because the were hunter-gatherers didn't mean they had no concept of trading for what they wanted from others.
The site could have been a trading spot, which could have evolved to be a sort of rest stop/hub of sorts. Of course cooking would have gone on in that context.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Bring that mutton sandwich here please.

"Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey if it ain't mutton tomorra." Troll from the Hobbit.