The Flowering of Flour 14,000 Years Ago

The meter-wide hearth where the charred remains of bread-like foods were found. Alexis Pantos. PNAS.

“Bread-like” foodstuffs were being made about 14,000 years ago, well before farming was well established. This according to a paper just published by Amaia Arranz-Otaegui and colleagues in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So, yes.  In spite of what many of the newspaper articles using pre-farming bread as a hook for their articles say, however, this is not really a great surprise to me as a food historian.

After all, a priori it’s hard to imagine why anyone would begin growing plants that they did not know how to turn in to food. Moreover evidence of grindstones and of the use various kinds of seeds and roots in human settlements going back 20,000 years has been accumulating for a couple of decades at least, as Arranz-Otaegi et al make clear.

That said, it’s good to have the sequence processed-grains-before-farmed grains confirmed. A good case can be made that the mastery of grains, not the transition to agriculture was the really life-changing development for humans, triggering the whole sequence of events that used to be lumped under the term “agricultural revolution.”

If this is a grindstone from the site, it’s still relatively small and would have been slow to use compared to later querns. Even so, simple tool, sophisticated product. Alexis Pantos. PNAS

That said, I was really impressed by two other aspects of the article.

First, the quality of the flour they found when analyzing the charred remains of the bread-like foodstuffs (the authors’ term, not mine) is amazing.  Half the grains in the charred remains were semolina sized or bigger, but a full half of them were the size of modern flour grains. There were no bits of grit or chaff in the samples as there are in later breads from, say, Egypt (though Delwen Samuel’s pioneering work was done on laborers’ bread if I remember). This means the flour was very nearly as fine as that we use today.

As the authors say, such fine flour could not have been made without de-husking, grinding, sieving, and/or winnowing, the latter three repeated several times. Each of these steps demands different equipment–probably a mortar to de-husk, a stone to grind, something to sieve (the authors are silent on this) and baskets to winnow. Once you know how to break down grains, sieving in order to get fine flour is key. (The baking was probably done in the ashes or on a bakestone, both of which make excellent flat breads.)

In the Middle Ages, fine flour was called “flower”–like flowers the finest, most refined part of the plant.  That ‘flower’ was already being produced thousands of years earlier we now know. Hence the title of this blog post.

One of the home truths of the history of technology is that technologies are not individual inventions (the light bulb) but whole systems (generators, cables, wires, pylons, switches as well as light bulbs)

So here we have one whole part of the technological system for making bread-like food in place. This is not a stumbling first step but the accomplishment of a long period of experimentation.

“Scanning electron microscope images of bread-like remains from Shubayqa 1. (A) Sample number 6 showing the typical porous matrix of bread with small closed voids. (B) Detail of an aleurone layer from sample number 17 (at least single celled). (C) Sample number 12 showing vascular tissue, the arrow marks the xylem vessels in longitudinal section.” Wow. Love this precision.

Second, it’s wonderful to see how the archaeologists have been forging ahead with the study of food in the last 30 or 40 years.  I was more or less up to speed a decade ago when I was finishing Cuisine and Empire but to my outsider’s eye, a lot has happened since.

A whole range of tools from identification kits to starch analysis to electron microscopes, although not new, are now really operative. It’s still slow, painstaking work, of course, but no longer does every tool have to be invented.

Descriptions of what different kinds of processing do, drawing on the work of food scientists and technologists published in places like the Journal of Food Engineering and Trends in Food Science and Technology, much tighter. Grinding wheat and barley produces a characteristic bulging pattern on the broken edges. Mixing flour and water and baking the dough produce a characteristic sequence of bubble formation, consolidation, and bursting, resulting in a porous substance.

The sequence of plant resources–including the underground storage organs of various rushes, and a whole variety of seeds–drawn on during the thousands of years moving to grain based diets in Western Asia, as well as the sequence of processing methods is being sketched out.

In conclusion, put together the sophistication of these 14,000-year-old bread-like foods and the repertoire of tools and concepts wielded by these ethnobotanists and it doesn’t seem a wild speculation to suggest that the next couple of decades are going to see an explosion in our understanding of the history of food between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic not only in Western Asia but in other parts of the world.

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Thanks to the many kind friends who sent me links to this paper. Things move so fast on social media that I am really grateful that you don’t let me miss anything.

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