Bread making: Human activity before the origin of agriculture

Cultural and physical diversity among the modern day humans is enormous and people wonder at the differences  in costumes, food habits and rituals of different communities and groups. This is in spite of the free availability of all types of information when almost everyone has the access to information. Cultural and physical diversity among the prehistoric humans inhabiting the planet must have been even greater. Human evolutionary and cultural history is generally challenged with every new find. We base our assumptions of universality of human evolution only from a few sporadic findings. This is the reason why the human evolutionary evidence even being fractured leads us to conceptualize and document a story about the evolution of  man only to be modified by the next available evidence. Till now the origin of agriculture is dated back to about 10,000 years and consequently came the technique of bread making and other products. But now archaeologists have unearthed a new evidence of bread making which pushes its date back by about 4000 years which means the first evidence of bread making is attributed to about 14400 years from now.

The discovery is reported by a team lead by Amaia Arranz-Otaegu from the University of Copenhagen which confirms the date by radioactive carbon dating method. Archaeological site in north eastern Jordan called Shubayqa 1 yielded two fire places which contained flatbread products besides cruciferous vegetables, legumes and gazelle meat. It was a typical hunter gatherer culture then. Since there was no trace of agriculture at that time, it was wondered what material it contained in bread-making. Analysis of the stuff obtained from the fire places indicated that this bread was made of wild varieties of einkorn a precursor to modern day cereals and tubers. The availability of meat, tubers, herbs and plant products were understandably the hallmarks of hunter gatherer culture but from where the cereals for bread making came. The authors emphasize that bread making from pre-agricultural varieties of cereals has become an established food staple during this period of Natufian culture specific to the Levant region of Eastern Mediterranean. The discovery projects that the bread-making culture appeared even prior to the advent of agriculture thus overthrowing the popular belief of simultaneous  origin of agriculture and bread-making. However, this singular discovery of baked bread  found at a particular place has to be proven  and reinforced by many more studies before it to be firmly established.