People were baking bread thousands of years before they developed agriculture — proven by the charred, 14,500-year-old remains of a flatbread found in a stone fireplace in northeastern Jordan, Reuters reported.
It shows that hunter-gatherers were making bread far earlier than previously known, according to the findings published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It is possible that bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food," said University of Copenhagen researcher Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, the lead author of the research.
The researchers tried recreating the bread they found at the Black Desert archaeological site but Arranz-Otaegui said it is "quite gritty and salty."
