Image copyrightAlexis PantosImage caption Plant beginnings were ground to add to the bread
Take flour made from wild wheat and barley, mix with the pulverised roots of floras, add ocean, then bake.
According to scientists, this is the recipe for the world’s oldest dough, dating back more than 14,000 years.
The bake would have looked like a flatbread and savoured a bit like today’s multi-grain bread, they say.
Our ancestors may have utilized the bread as a fold for cooked meat. Thus, as well as being the oldest food, it may also have been the oldest sandwich.
“This is the earliest evidence we have for what we could really call a cuisine, in that it’s a mixed food product, ” Prof Dorian Fuller of University College London told BBC News.
“They’ve get flatbreads, and they’ve get cooked gazelle and so forth, and that’s something they are then utilize to make a meal.”
Image copyrightJoe RoeImage caption Ali Shakaiteer and Dr Amaia Arranz-Otaegui sampling cereals in such areas where the food was discovered
Bread has long been part of our staple food. But little is familiar with the parentages of bread-making.
Until now, the oldest evidence of bread came from Turkey 9,000 years ago.
The recent catch, from an archaeological website in the Black Desert in Jordan, pushes back the first attest for bread-making by more than 5,000 years.
Scientists disclosed two buildings, each containing a large circular stone fireplace within which charred food crumbs were found.