14,400-year-old flatbread remains that predate known agriculture

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/worlds-oldest-bread

by vinayan3 • 8 years ago

291 159 8 years ago

ryanmercer7• 8 years ago

*predate known agricultural settlements.

It seems pretty clear that a rigid binary classification of societies in to settled/agricultural and nomadic/hunter-gatherer is false.

For example: What constitutes a settlement anyway? Just how long does it need to be in use before it's a settlement instead of a camp? Does regular seasonal use constitute permanence? In many hunter gatherer societies agriculture is documented. What about if shelter is natural (rock shelter), mobile (yurts or boats) or unnecessary (good weather)?

This is all part of a general ancient history rethink that I think it's fair to say is going on. We've figured out that ancient history is far more nuanced than many 20th century Western history scholars gave it credit for, and modern archaeology and genetics in particular are only now showing us the scale of our misconceptions.

Example areas of complete rethink: peopling of the Americas, continued diversity (and interbreeding with) non-homo-sapiens, speed and breadth of human diffusion, speed and breadth of technology invention and diffusion in pre-historic peoples.

ryanmercer7• 8 years ago

It seems pretty clear that a rigid binary classification of societies in to settled/agricultural and nomadic/hunter-gatherer is false.

Here's the problem, there's an established 'story' and if someone tries to go against that established 'story' about human history, they will find themselves unemployable. They will not be permitted to be a part of digs, they will not be able to find grant money, they will not be able to find a university that will take them in.

If someone finds something that even adds doubt it's immediately labeled a misinterpretation, a fake, some natural process that resembles human activity etc.

Add to that if you go back to Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago you wipe out most of the human population at the time with some estimates getting you into a few thousand humans across the entire planet which obviously could have ended societies that did exist at the time and were not nomadic, if they were using largely grass and wood for their construction, a supervolcano erupting could have quickly led to using construction materials for heat source, as a source of food for any animals that were struggling to find food etc. Even small settlements spread out might go undiscovered by archaeologists for centuries.

If you look at Kenya’s Olorgesailie Basin there's potentially evidence of tool building 320,000 years ago. That right there kinda takes everything and goes "yeahhhhhhhhhh we're probably wrong" https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a194478...

Telling me we had tools 320k years ago but we didn't figure out agriculture until 12-14k years ago? Heh. Ssssssure.

I urge anyone to go read about the history of archaeology, it's only until extremely recently (the mid 1900's) that it even started to become a proper science and even then most of the labor was untrained volunteer and many an important site were discovered by people native to the area before properly trained people were notified and brought in.

Even recorded history is extremely suspect until very modern times. Some will argue it didn't become reliable until the 11th-12th century but we still see instances of stuff unreliable past that. Some firmly believe Joan of Arc is a fabrication for example, which calls 15th century 'history' into question... when someone questions her existence with logic they are quickly called a 'revisionist' and considered a nutjob though.

The fact that 'revisionist' and 'historical revisionism' exist as concepts are troubling because they are often used disparagingly of anyone that questions the 'official story' where in other disciplines it would be considered healthy skepticism.

imbokodo• 8 years ago

First of all, this finding can be incorrect. It can be misdated, they may have made a mistake about the grain being processed into bread.

Even if they are 100% right, it doesn't really upend anything majorly. It just means what it says - hunter-gatherers turned the grains they gathered into bread 5000 years earlier than we thought. Any how, the Natufians and Chinese are thought to be the first two cultures to become agricultural.

What you're talking about is 20/20 hindsight. You're living in a world with self-driving cars and Mars space probes and croissants and corn and looking back with that lens. There were innumerable barriers entering into agriculture (and not only barriers, but most hunter-gatherer bands preferred roaming around their territory as opposed to remaining in one place all the time and doing the same thing every day).

We did not have corn and wheat and domesticated animals and oxen and crop rotation. Infectious diseases were as much a problem as when the New World's indigenous societies encountered Europeans.

Anthropologists say the Neolithic revolution was dramatic because it was dramatic. It was a complete transformation of society - more socially transformative than anything that has happened in the past 30000 years.

megaman22• 8 years ago

It seems pretty obvious that what we know about is the barest sliver of what was actually going on tens of thousands of years ago. If nothing else, look at historical sea levels through the fluctuations caused by the ice ages. Vast areas that are currently at the bottom of the oceans were dry land, most famously the Bering land bridge and Doggerland, but huge, huge areas all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

https://www.deviantart.com/atlas-v7x/art/Coastlines-of-the-I...

Even in recorded history, terrain is much more malleable than you might expect - rivers changing their course, sometimes wildly, is not especially uncommon. For instance, it is well attested that the Yellow River has changed course such that it has reached the sea both north and south of Shandong in various eras.

http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090526-history-Yellow-R...

snapdangle3• 8 years ago

"It seems pretty obvious that what we know about is the barest sliver of what was actually going on tens of thousands of years ago."

It doesn't seem to be obvious to most highly educated people I know. From their perspective, the history of humanity might as well be only 5,000 years old, they rarely open up to any kind of interest in the fact that ancient civilizations from 3K-5K BC considered _their own civilizations_ to be degraded forms of much earlier civilizations.

It is also completely off the boards to discuss the potential of rapid techtonic shifts periodically erasing human societies. There are quite a few underwater cities in ruins, and of course myths and legends of even larger ones. But they don't get much play.

Importantly, cultures with oral traditions are much more capable of recording accurately details from 10,000+ years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/australian-stories...

iambateman• 8 years ago

In other words, everybody really does like pizza.

mirimir6• 8 years ago

Cheese, you say they had cheese! Damn.

zhte415• 8 years ago

Quite probably. Cheese and milk products are nutritionally dense. On Food and Cooking documents milk producing 'Bos primigenius' (cow) at 6ft tall 8000 years BCE, with sheep and goats also used for milk and cheese production at that time.

Cheese would have probably been easier than bread!

grumpwagon• 8 years ago

Send them to this guy, he'll eat them:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/fea...

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

I love that guy!

Mmm...that tastes...disgusting...I’m going to eat some more...

ryanmercer7• 8 years ago

Heh, I just spent a month watching all of Steve's videos. He's... he's brave. In one he has 50-60-year-old open can of jam and he eats some "I hope I don't get botulism, I don't have insurance". and then takes a few more bites...

AgentOrange1234• 8 years ago

Slightly past the 5 second rule :(

narrator• 8 years ago

Since this doesn't conform to the pre-existing theory of the development of agriculture I expect it to go poof and disappear in a puff of logic any minute now.

mirimir6• 8 years ago

“Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread, so the fact that bread predates agriculture is kind of stunning,” says Tobias Richter, a University of Copenhagen archaeologist who co-authored the paper. “Because making bread is quite labor-intensive, and you don’t necessarily get a huge return for it. So it doesn’t seem like an economical thing to do.” That’s because breadmaking doesn’t just involve baking: Back then, it would have also involved kneading, grinding cereals into fine grains, and dehusking plants.

But why would agriculture have developed, if people were't cooking the stuff? It's true that making bread involves more work than just boiling grain. But bread also serves as ready-to-eat storage. As does beer. And I can imagine how both developed more-or-less accidentally from leftover boiled grain.

rch• 8 years ago

How Beer Gave Us Civilization

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...

mirimir6• 8 years ago

That's a great article, for sure. But back in the day, it's arguable that beer was mainly for grain preservation. It's very hard to get wasted on low-EtOH beer. Which is what early beers would have been.

stevenwoo• 8 years ago

The bread as described in the article was made from relatively finely ground grain, so unlikely to be accidental, and the article references finds of similar flatbreads from just a few thousand years later at different locations.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 8 years ago

@mirimir wrote "And I can imagine how both developed more-or-less accidentally from leftover boiled grain."

Not that this particular example was an accident from leftover boiled grain.

mirimir6• 8 years ago

I'm not arguing that this bread was accidental, but that people may have noticed that partially burned leftover gruel was tasty. Also, it's arguably easier to grind leftover gruel than dry grain. Because it somewhat holds together. I know from wet grinding homemade black powder, but it's the same idea. Except for the not-exploding part, anyway :)

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

Someone probably sent their toddler to go rub grain between two rocks to keep the toddler out of their hair while they butchered a goat or something.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 8 years ago

Because making bread is quite labor-intensive

It's important to remember there is no evidence to suggest our 14,400 year-ago-ancestors had office / factory / workshop jobs to go to for 60 hours a week. Probably very little in the way of school or universities assignments to hand in by Friday. And they likely didn't have to pick up the dry cleaning or the kids on their way home.

I'm going to propose that, probably, everything the ancients did was labour intensive. Predominately due to not having invented the powered machine yet.

wavefunction• 8 years ago

You can gut and dress an animal quickly if you're practiced. Snares and stake traps paired with flushing animals doesn't take a lot of 'intensive labor.'

We even have the ruins of catch traps in central Asia and other places that would have industrialized animal slaughter before agriculture was ever a thing.

Agriculture was likely a required response to human degradation of formerly productive areas for hunter-gatherers due to over-taking of natural resources.

coldtea4• 8 years ago

I'm going to propose that, probably, everything the ancients did was labour intensive. Predominately due to not having invented the powered machine yet.

Or, inversely, as soon as they covered their food needs (which could be quite meagre) they were pretty leisurely, like many primitive tribes the ethnologists have studied.

Isamu• 8 years ago

“Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread

I think it is clear with this "flatbread" that we are seeing evidence for proto-pizza delivery. They may yet turn up what amount to coupons, perhaps as notches on sticks, or perhaps a receipt or change.

bane• 8 years ago

Years ago I watched a documentary about Sago production in Papau New Guinea. It comes from a Palm tree that's cut down before the fruit ripens (otherwise all of the valuable starch gets used up ripening the fruit). The starch is contained in the core of the tree. A single tree can yield hundreds of pounds of starch, but getting it out of the tree and processed to get rid of the wood pulp and such is incredibly labor intensive. The starch is then cooked into various kinds of pancakes and other dishes to eat.

Traditionally (and for all I know) the trees weren't farmed. Somebody just walked around until they found a suitable tree and then cut it down. So...hunting and gathering. But IIR, people track the growth of individual trees to make sure they're harvested at the right age, but they aren't specifically planted or cultivated in a "farm" sense.

It's not a terribly different notion from what's being written about here I think. I would guess that humans have found starches of various kinds throughout their environment, extracted and processed them, and then made simple flatbreads or pancakes almost everywhere.

It doesn't even have to be obvious. The line from palm tree to sago is not clear at all. Why even consider eating the core of a tree? Why invent a long, multi-part, labor intensive process to make it more edible? Nobody really knows how it started.

But I think the important point I got from this was that agriculture is not a clean cut-off. You aren't digging out root vegetables one day and then planting wheat the next. There must be some kind of transition period that depends on the local plant life and many of the things that we think of as indicative of post cut-off agriculture societies probably aren't that at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfGxm8canXg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VomE4GN9Z6I

yesiamyourdad3• 8 years ago

Well, if you're starving, you'll try anything. If you survive, hey, that worked, let's do it again!

People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced with death, you'll try anything.

specialist• 8 years ago

"...agriculture is not a clean cut-off."

Even today.

There's a lot of taper along the spectrum: hunting, foraging, gardening, farming, manufacturing.

Trees, fish, mushrooms...

Ditto non food stuffs.

bayesian_horse3• 8 years ago

I don't believe bread is that much easier to store than grain. Easier to carry maybe.

The problem about grain before agriculture was to collect it. The right conditions to make that feasible existed only in certain regions.

vfc1• 8 years ago

Indeed, they must have known that they could make bread out of wild grains before they even learned how to seed and harvest crops, otherwise, why would they have done in the first place?

Wild grain would probably grow in the same place year after year, and the tribe would go back to harvest it even though they did not plant it themselves intentionally or irrigated the soil.

weberc23• 8 years ago

But why would agriculture have developed, if people were't cooking the stuff?

This was my intuition as well. And IIRC, wheat was naturally plentiful in at least some parts of the fertile crescent, such that people could bake bread without needing to farm it. In such places, heavy grinding stones and other artifacts were found which suggested that people had settled (they were far too heavy to be picked up and moved from place to place) because the region was so abundant.

Nasrudith2• 8 years ago

That surprised me really - aside from not knowing how bread sounds ideal to gatherers for condensing their finding into transportable and preserved bread. And they both do have a lot of time to kill too.

The tools sound like a real obstacle given how fanatically low possession hunter gatherers are - doing things like flint knapping on demand tools instead of specialized tools. Perhaps gatherer divergence - they would need just a pot and maybe a vegetation cutter at most to be useful for gathering and cooking while hunters could need just things to kill and butcher their kills. Wood and stone both being grabbed in situ.

itchyjunk• 8 years ago

How accurate can these dating be? Can you really pin down burnt bread to 14.5k years? Maybe this was ritualistic. I don't know if you can infer that they regularly ate bread. Maybe some peganistic ritual or burial ritual had bread involved.

Grain yield pre agriculture is supposed to be really low. So low that there are hypothesis claiming that it was used to brew beer and eating the grain directly wouldn't be viable for the tribe. I guess we'll wait and see as more researchers chimes into this.

muricula• 8 years ago

This is a classic use case for carbon 14 dating, so they probably used that. A quick glance at Wikipedia says that it’s pretty reliable for organic substances up to 50k years ago. Dating older rocks will often require lead uranium dating or other interesting radioactive elements.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating

flukus2• 8 years ago

Perhaps the assumption that bread is a product of agriculture is the wrong way around? If bread was already being consumed then it would make sense to want a more centralized and reliable source of grain.

abakker• 8 years ago

Is bread paleo now?

psergeant• 8 years ago

OMFG BREAD IS PALEO NOW! My life just got better

foobar1962• 8 years ago

This was my thought too -- at least about Paleo diet proponents rejecting grains.

IMHO these early people were smart enough to work out ways to eat things that were available to them. They probably had cooking with heat, boiling in water, grinding with stone, and probably worked out using salted water for preservation, and kept the spoiled food that had random yeast that tasted good and used it for culture.

Rice is a soft grain and can be eaten whole. Grains like wheat are HARD and need grinding to be edible. The hard grains keep well, so there was a big incentive to work out how to use them. A tribe that got it right probably had quite an advantage.

The movie "10,000" works on this idea.

hutzlibu2• 8 years ago

"Grains like wheat are HARD "

But wheat did not existed back then. And the wild grains I know, are edible with your teeth ...

bayesian_horse3• 8 years ago

Most paleolithic people didn't live near plains where suitable wild grain was abundant.

And these wild species formed the basis for agriculture later.

bayesian_horse3• 8 years ago

That's how the earliest bread winners brought home the dough.

coldtea4• 8 years ago

"That predate the prevalent half-assed educated guesses about when agriculture started, similar to many other assumptions about the ancient and pre-historic world that we have to revise every few years with new discoveries" would be a better title...

Edit: Downvotes as if the comment is controversial? Here is some food for thought:

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/71133/20150722/discovery-...

http://thedailyjournalist.com/scientia/the-origins-of-chines...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/15/485722228/wh...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722144709.h...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/evidence-that-humans...

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rice-farming-in-india-muc...

peterwwillis• 8 years ago

They're "half-assed" guesses in the same sense that every scientific discipline has been proven inaccurate as understanding of it evolved. Give us a few hundred more years of digging in the sand and we'll have some better theories.

basicplus2• 8 years ago

<“Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread, so the fact that bread predates agriculture is kind of stunning,” says Tobias Richter>

Australian Aboriginies where making bread from native grasses for many thousands years, finely ground with stones, toxins washed out and cooked on hot coals and stones

.. not a Seeminly well informed professor

dalbasal8• 8 years ago

Nothing to do with bread but...

Over the last couple of decades, this 10k-15k ybp period has gotten a lot more interesting. Especially to us romantics, who always want origins to be more ancient and mysterious. The Natufian Culture now has a lot of sites. Everything from proof of a predominantly hunter gatherer diet to a full scale sedentary city, 9,000 year old Jericho. We even know they particularly enjoyed eating cat, and may have domesticated them for food.

Even more remarkable is the progress in southeastern Turkey. Gobleki Tepeh is a find on such a scale that it challenges archeologists to re-narrate the neolithic revolution. Many think that it reverses the old narrative: Agriculture lead to caloric surpluses, permanent settlements, cities, organised religions, kings, advanced art, complex mythology... Maybe an organised religion crowned the first god-kings, designated specialised societal roles, built temples, then cities, and invented agriculture to support them.

Near Gobleki Tepeh is Catal Huyuk, a residential "city" archeologically and temporally similar Jericho. It appears to have been built after Gobleki Tepeh, a more "ritualistic" site. Perhaps archeologists should be looking for ancient temple sites, predating Jericho.

Perhaps the Egyptian pattern is to be expected. First, giant ritualistic projects are undertaken. Politics appears to be simple, the king is a god. People do what he says. Complexity comes later. Maybe this is normal. Maybe modes of production follow from modes of culture, to put it in 19th century terms.

Egypt's old kingdom were the the great builders. Out of "nowhere" they suddenly take on massive works, million man-year projects. The middle & new kingdoms were more advanced politically, agriculturally, economically & militarily. But, the scale of ritualistic sites declined. They still had great temples, and fine art keeps progressing. Literature proliferates. Law advances. But, the amount of labour dedicated to pure ritual seems to peak near the "beginning."

It is a fascinating period. The middle east definitely has its roots here. Keep up the good work archeologists. We appreciate it, us spectators.

barking4• 8 years ago

Why would anyone write ybp instead of ago?

Edit: OK, you'd need to say years ago but still, is this another part of the dropping the AD and BC tendency?

dalbasal8• 8 years ago

erm... IDK... AFAIK, YBP is used commonly in articles talking about this period. I guess having a 0 point 2018 years in the past is clunkier, and we're used to marking years with an acronym.

We use a lot more acronyms these days, generally. The better ones can be guessed from context. I personally don't mind the BC/AD, for iron age and later. It's actually convenient that year 0 corresponds roughly to the beginning of Rome's height.

ainiriand• 8 years ago

Slightly related good man/woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs

givan• 8 years ago

The most interesting thing about Göbekli Tepe the oldest megalith structure discovered, is that a study based on the drawings on the structure correlated with Younger Dryas period might explain why nothing was found about the ancient civilization that built it.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues-co...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128512-ancient-carving...

Science might just have found the cause for the flood myth that is present in most cultures around the world.

dalbasal8• 8 years ago

Hmm... Seems very speculative. I think you'd need some more evidence before concluding this is a calendar that you can interpret.

That said, the entire site is of interest to those interested in flood myths. It was an active site during the period when climactic disasters and floods were happening. Ice melted. Seas rose. The nearby black sea was expanding, and eventually spilled into the aegean. This is also (intriguingly) the date plato gave for atlantis' destruction.

weberc23• 8 years ago

This subject fascinates me. I've seen a couple of documentaries, but if anyone has more recommendations, please do share! Great post, by the way!

enkephalin• 8 years ago

hey, i read your comment six days ago, and somehow managed to not forget about it. just recently found this podcast:

http://www.astonishinglegends.com/al-podcasts/2018/5/26/ep-1...

http://www.astonishinglegends.com/al-podcasts/2018/06/10/ep-...

http://www.astonishinglegends.com/al-podcasts/2018/06/17/ep-...

EGreg• 8 years ago

What do we know about the circumstances of Jericho’s destruction?

Kathleen Kenyon’s findings seem to match the events described in the Bible.

dalbasal8• 8 years ago

We know that it's has taken many a battering over the last 10 thousand years, but it's still a city.

dghughes• 8 years ago

I like ancient cultures too, the two I find interesting are:

In Egypt the dakhleh oasis has evidence of habitation for 200,000 years. I don't know if what's meant by habitation means it's always been human or generally hominid. But I think 200,000 years is quite recent for any hominids other than what we became to be around.

The other interesting thing is the situation of the San indigenous people of southern Africa region. They are supposedly a very old culture living in the area well over 100,000 years and even their DNA is unique compared to other African peoples. It's odd to think the Bantu, Zulu etc. are the "invaders" of the region, the new people in the area.

dalbasal8• 8 years ago

Something similar can be said about most of the natufian range. Sapien habitation predating the out of Africa^ dispersal, and therefore not our "line" if the theory is true.

There was also a neanderthal population that seems to have succeeded and older sapien population, which is unusual in the record.

It's very old people stomping grounds, for pretty much any definition of people. Pretty much anything from early homo erectus to early scholars has a token ancestor there.

kaycebasques7• 8 years ago

I just read about Gobekli Tepe in Sapiens and was going to mention how fascinating it is that it challenges the agricultural revolution => religion narrative.

dalbasal8• 8 years ago

I like that story better, personally. The original narrative is kind of Malthusian. Find more calories, have more babies. Everything is about nutritional economics. Hari puts culture first. It just wasn't possible for everyone to get along in such a big group, untill it was figured out.

accoil• 8 years ago

YBP: years before present

jlebrech• 8 years ago

it was invented by the elon musk of bread, after he sold enough bread he made a mega factory to produce enough grain for his operation.

piccolbo• 8 years ago

One thing that fascinates me about archeology is how they would come up with new conclusions based on a single observation. Quite the smallest sample size of any natural science I can think of, only thing I can compare to is the case study in medicine and psychoanalysis. One case, but very intensely studied.

14,400-year-old flatbread remains that predate known agriculture

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