How exactly did bread—an integral part of so many meals and cultures—come to be? The creation of bread was unquestionably one of the key developm

A Definitive Timeline of Bread

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2024-10-08 13:30:10

How exactly did bread—an integral part of so many meals and cultures—come to be? The creation of bread was unquestionably one of the key developments in human history. It's no exaggeration to say that without bread, we literally might not be.

In this article, we'll trace the history of one of the world's most important foods, from flatbread to sliced bread, and point out the major milestones along the way.

As with much of early civilization, our knowledge of when people first did what is limited by what we can find evidence for. So for instance, we think that humans first learned to control fire between 400,000 and 1 million years ago. That's a pretty wide range, and it might have been much earlier. But we don't know for sure.

We have evidence of humans gathering wild grains from at least 100,000 years ago and the earliest evidence of humans grinding these grains dates to around 30,000 years ago in the form of starch residue on stones, probably left over from grinding a combination of grains and roots to form a paste.