A not-so-fresh loaf of 8,600-year-old bread has been found at Çatalhöyük, an extremely early city located in today’s Turkey. While older flatbread – or at least what’s left of it – has been found in Jordan, the researchers on this project believe the doughy discovery might be the oldest bread loaf of its kind.
Archeologists found the artifact in 2021 while excavating a furnace structure in Çatalhöyük. It wasn’t initially clear what the “sponge residue” was, but their analysis revealed it was a cooked dough that was likely fermented around 6,600 BCE.
Fortunately, the bread was wrapped in a unique style that allowed it to be relatively well-preserved for thousands of years.
“With careful documentation, it was understood that the small and round spongy find in the corner of the oven was bread. The fact that the structure was covered with a thin clay, both wood and bread, made it possible for all of these organic remains to be found. It allowed it to be preserved until today,” Dr. Ali Umut Türkcan, head of the excavation delegation at Anadolu University, said in a .
“Radiocarbon tests performed at TÜBTAK Marmara Research Center showed that our sample could go back to approximately 6,600 BCE,” explained Dr Türkcan.
is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that’s considered to be one of the earliest hubs of urbanization in the world. It’s known as a proto-city; it had a dense population of 8,000 people, but it lacked some of the central planning and centralized rule we tend to associate with urban environments today.
The discovery of bones at the site has indicated that animals were domesticated at Çatalhöyük, highlighting a time when humans were moving away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles and towards settled agriculture. Likewise, the discovery of bread suggests they also started dabbling with the domestication of early grain crops.
“We need to say that the starting point of food archeology is Anatolia. Çatalhöyük is one of the very important stops here,” added Türkcan.
Türkcan goes on to describe the find in Çatalhöyük as “the oldest bread in the world.” However, rivals to that claim exist elsewhere in the Middle East. In 2018, archaeologists discovered the of a flatbread in northeastern Jordan’s Black Desert.
The discovery in Çatalhöyük appears to be a little more sophisticated as it’s a loaf of bread, not just unleavened bread that was cooked without rising agents such as yeast.