8,600 year old bread found in Iraq/@the_jenc
A loaf of bread not quite safe to eat, 8,600 years old to be exact, was found in Çetlhoyuk - an archaeological site from the Stone Age, located in the Konya Plain in the south of Anatolia (Asia Minor) in Turkey.
The researchers in this project believe that their doughy discovery may be the oldest loaf of bread of its kind in the world, but some dispute this assertion.
Archaeologists found the bread as early as 2021 while excavating an ancient oven building and found remnants of a sponge of unknown origin.
The analysis of the findings revealed that it was uncooked dough that was probably fermented around 6,600 BC.
Fortunately, the bread was covered in a unique way that allowed it to be preserved relatively well for thousands of years.
"On careful examination, it was understood that the small, round spongy find in the corner of the oven was bread. The fact that the structure was covered with thin clay, both the wood and the bread, allowed the existence of all these organic remains and allowed their preservation to this day," said Dr. Ali Umut Turkan, head of the expedition The excavations at Anadolu University, in a statement to the Turkish state news agency, "Carbon dating carried out at the research center showed that our specimen may date from 6,600 BC.
Analytical analysis determined that the organic remains were 8,600-year-old bread, uncooked and fermented."
This is what the oldest bread in the world looks like
The mostly destroyed oven building is in an area called "Macan 66", where there are nearby mud brick houses, also in the archaeological site of Četlhoyuk.
The head of the delegation added: "This is a smaller version of a loaf of bread. There is a finger press in the center. The bread was not baked, but it was fermented and survived to this day with the starches inside. There is no similar example of such a thing to this day."
Images taken with the help of a scanning microscope showed air spaces in the sample, with the starch grains "eliminating our suspicions," said biologist Saleh Kabak, a lecturer at Gaziantep University in Turkey, "this is an exciting discovery for Turkey and for the whole world."
He added that the analysis found chemicals found in plants and indicators of fermentation, "flour and water were mixed in, when the bread was prepared near the oven and kept for a while."
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Here he is
Wait, is there any older bread?
While Dr. Turkan insists that this is the oldest bread in the world, some claim that an older bread has been found in the past. In 2018, archaeologists discovered 14,400-year-old remains of flat bread in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan. The Guinness Book of Records also states that the oldest bread in the world - made from wild grains such as barley, einkorn and oats - was found in Jordan and is from 14,000 years ago. However, the discovery in Çetlhoyuk seems to be a little more "sophisticated" because it is a loaf of bread and not just a flat bread made without leavening agents such as yeast.
This is what the ancient flat bread found in Jordan looks like/official website, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
This is how bread was made thousands of years ago:
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Četlhoyuk was home to around 8,000 people during the Neolithic period, from around 10,000 BC to 2,000 BC - and is one of the first urban areas in the world.
Research at the well-preserved site has revealed layouts Unique housing and extensive features such as wall paintings and reliefs - what many consider "the most significant human settlement documenting the early agricultural life of a Neolithic community," according to the UNESCO website.
"Many original things were found in Çetlhoyuk. The first textiles in the world, wooden objects and wall paints and paintings. Konya and Turkey are very lucky in this sense," Turkan said.
The discovery of the latest findings highlights the period when humans moved away from their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and moved towards settled agriculture with early grain crops.
The Israeli Institute of Archeology says that the site in Chetalhoyuk is built over two domes: the eastern one - the earlier and larger one and the western one - the smaller and later one.
Between the domes and around them there is alluvial soil that was a fertile ground for agricultural crops.
The researchers estimate that up to ten thousand residents lived on the site, although based on the inhabited area of the site it is likely that the number of its residents did not exceed about five thousand.
Some have distinguished among its remains a series of distinctions, which define the settlement as a city not only because of its size but also because of its social organization.
If it was a city, then it is among the oldest in the world.
But on the other hand, no findings were found on the site that indicate social hierarchy, which are recognized in research as important tests in defining an ancient settlement as a city.
The site's researchers described his houses as a kind of beehive of adjoining residential units, between which there are almost no vacant spaces.
Access to the houses was through openings in the roofs and ladders.
In the absence of streets and alleys, the passage between the houses was carried out on the roofs.
The dimensions of the houses on the site were not uniform.
Some of them are relatively large and usually decorated with wall paintings and carved cattle skulls.
These buildings may have been used as temples.
The dwellings there were probably smaller.
They were characterized by three levels.
Under the floors, the members of the house used to bury their dead.
Next to the skeletons, many and varied finds were found, including pottery seals, obsidian mirrors and pottery figurines.
In many cases, they removed the dead man's head from the skeleton, cremated it and placed it in the house, perhaps to commemorate the ancestors of the family.
The ground level was used for routine life.
Many houses had stoves that were used for cooking, even though there were no windows in the building and the smoke came out of the openings in the roof.
These stoves were probably also used to heat the houses in the very cold winters in the Anatolian plateau.
The ventilated roof was also used for routine activities of the household members.
Among the finds of the site are known figurines showing a naked and abundant woman, sitting on a throne, and sometimes it seems that she is shown pregnant.
The figurines of this type were kept in the residents' houses.
According to the researchers, the statuette shows the fertility goddess responsible for the fertility of the family and therefore these statues were common in different versions in many homes.
Among the many murals on the site is also a painting depicting the Hasan Dağı volcano, which rises to a height of 3,268 meters, a few tens of kilometers east of Çatalhöyük. The painting shows the two peaks of the volcano and even shows an abstract description of Volcanic eruption. At the foot of the mountain there is a description of square shapes adjacent to each other and according to the researchers this is a description of Çetlhoyuk houses. On clear winter days in the Anatolian plateau, the snow-covered mountain looms from great distances and it leaves a great impression on everyone who lives in the area or passes through it. The mural of the mountain is, apparently, the earliest landscape description known to us around the world.
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