July 17, 2018 - 15:46 AMT
Oldest evidence of bread discovered in Jordan

Scientists have discovered the earliest known evidence of bread-making, from a 14,000-year-old dig site in Jordan, BBC reports.

The bake would have looked like a flatbread and tasted a bit like today's multi-grain varieties, they say.

Our ancestors may have used the bread as a wrap for roasted meat. Thus, as well as being the oldest bread, it may also have been the oldest sandwich.

The find, from the Black Desert in Jordan, pushes back the first evidence for bread by more than 5,000 years.

The stone age bread-makers took flour made from wild wheat and barley, mix it with the pulverised roots of plants, added water, and then baked it.

The product would have looked like a flatbread and tasted a bit like today's multi-grain bread, they say.

"This is the earliest evidence we have for what we could really call a cuisine, in that it's a mixed food product," Prof Dorian Fuller of University College London told BBC News.

"They've got flatbreads, and they've got roasted gazelle and so forth, and that's something they are then using to make a meal."

Bread has long been part of our staple diet. But little is known about the origins of bread-making.

Until now, the oldest evidence of bread came from Turkey; those finds are 9,000 years old.

Scientists uncovered two buildings, each containing a large circular stone fireplace within which charred bread crumbs were found.