The oldest bread
Charred flatbread crumbs in a Jordanian fireplace predate agriculture by 4,000 years.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Excavation at Shubayqa 1 in northeastern Jordan recovered charred remains from a stone fireplace, identified in 2018 as flatbread made from wild einkorn, club-rush tubers and other gathered plants, ground and baked around 14,400 years ago. Making bread from wild cereals is laborious, which suggests it was valued enough to justify the effort — and possibly that the appetite for bread was one of the things that motivated growing cereals deliberately.