Most people think bread was born after people started farming. But scientists found burnt pieces of bread in an old fireplace in Jordan.

The bread was baked about 14,400 years ago. That is at least 4,000 years before farming began! The people who made it were hunter-gatherers. They used wild grains and plant roots. Their bread was flat, like a tortilla.

In northeastern Jordan, archaeologists studied a stone fireplace at a site called Shubayqa 1, where Natufian hunter-gatherers lived. Inside, they found 24 charred pieces of food. In 2018, a team led by Amaia Arranz-Otaegui reported that these pieces were made from grains that had been ground into flour, mixed, and baked, much like flatbread.

The bread was about 14,400 years old, at least 4,000 years older than the start of farming. It was made from wild einkorn wheat and the roots of a water plant. Because making flour by hand took so much effort, the researchers think this bread may have been a special food rather than an everyday meal.

Charred crumbs from a fireplace at Shubayqa 1, a site in Jordan's Black Desert occupied by Natufian hunter-gatherers, have pushed the origins of bread back to about 14,400 years ago, at least four millennia before plants were clearly domesticated in southwest Asia. In a 2018 study, archaeobotanists examined 24 charred food remains under an electron microscope and compared their microstructure with experimentally charred breads and porridges. Fragments of grain bran and finely ground particles suggested that wild einkorn and the underground parts of a wetland plant had been ground, sieved, kneaded, and baked into flatbread.

Because processing wild cereals by hand was so laborious, the authors proposed that bread was a special food, perhaps served at feasts, and speculated that demand for it may have encouraged people to cultivate cereals. However, the feast idea rests on inference rather than direct evidence, and agriculture likely emerged from many factors, including climate change and population growth. The bread's flatness and tiny air holes suggest the dough was probably not fermented. Similar debates surround claims that people at a cave in Israel brewed a beer-like drink some 13,000 years ago.