Of Maize and Men: Humans Have Been Baking Bread for 15,000 Years

The blackened crumbs of an ancient fireplace have revealed that our ancestors ate bread thousands of years earlier than archaeologists previously thought.

The tiny charred pieces of cereals and plant roots discovered in northeastern Jordan are the remains of the oldest bread ever discovered, from nearly 15,000 years ago.

Archaeologist Amaia Arranz-Otaegui and colleagues found the crumbs in the ancient fireplaces of a Natufian hunter-gatherer site believed to date between 14,600 and 11,600 years ago. Before this discovery the earliest evidence of bread were 9,100 year old remains found in Turkey.