‘World’s oldest bread,’ dating back 8,600 years, discovered in Turkey
CNN
Archeologists in Turkey say they have discovered the world’s oldest known bread, dating back to 6600 BC.
Archeologists in Turkey say they have discovered the world’s oldest known bread, dating back to 6600 BC. A largely destroyed oven structure was found in an area called “Mekan 66,” where there are adjoining mudbrick houses, at the archeological site of Çatalhöyük in the southern Turkish province of Konya, according to Turkey’s Necmettin Erbakan University Science and Technology Research and Application Center (BİTAM). Around the oven, archeologists found wheat, barley, pea seeds and a palm-sized, round, “spongy” residue, it said in a press release Wednesday. Analyses determined that the organic residue was 8,600-year-old, uncooked, fermented bread. “We can say that this find at Çatalhöyük is the oldest bread in the world,” archeologist Ali Umut Türkcan, head of the Excavation Delegation and an associate professor at Anadolu University in Turkey, told Turkish state news outlet Anadolu Agency Wednesday. “It is a smaller version of a loaf of bread. It has a finger pressed in the center, it has not been baked, but it has been fermented and has survived to the present day with the starches inside. There is no similar example of something like this to date,” he added.