The Origins of Bread and its Relevance to Human Culture
Look at the picture above. What do you see? Is it a piece of volcanic rock found on the island of Hawaii? Is it blackened coral taken from the Great Barrier Reef? Or perhaps is it the fragment of an early human skull? Surprisingly, it is one of the most widely consumed foods in the world—bread.
Amaia Arranz-Otaegui is an archaeologist from the University of Copenhagen and was studying an ancient fireplace of the Natufians, a hunter-gatherer tribe from 14,000 years ago, in modern day Jordan. It was then that she found tiny black particles scattered around the fire pit.
“They looked like what we find in our toasters,” Arranz-Otaegui said.
And upon further analysis, it was found that these were indeed plant matter, or in other words, bread. This became the oldest bread ever discovered on earth. This was 4,000 years before what historians had thought was the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution—the start of agriculture and human civilization. Therefore, it seems as humans, we became bakers before we became farmers. Which is surprising, because the bread making process requires a lot of time and effort, especially for our previous hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
Archaeologist Lara Gonzalez Carretero believes that since our ancestors were willing to invest time in this labor-intensive process, it suggests that baking bread was reserved for special occasions. Which makes sense, as almost every culture in the world developed some ritual around bread.
Mexico has created Pan de Muerto to celebrate their ancestors on the Day of the Dead. Naan or roti, is served with almost every meal throughout all social classes of India. Ethiopians feast together, using injera, a bread made from a grain called teff as their utensils. Bread has even filtered into our religious traditions, from the breaking of the bread that symbolizes the body of Jesus Christ in Christianity to the challah bread of Yom Kippur in Judaism. Bread is synonymous with not only food, but a form of physical and spiritual nourishment.
There are thousands upon thousands of variations of bread around the world. Tortilla, baguettes, brioche, biscuits, bocadillo, chapati, ciabatta, lavash, pita, and pretzel, to name a few. In fact, Germany alone claims over 1,300 types of bread, rolls and pastries.
It seems that what started around the fire more than 14,000 years ago, has continued to be ingrained into who we are as humans. There is something about bread that ignites a sense of calm within us.
As American food writer, Mary F.K. Fisher stated, “the smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.”
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