News Tonight Africa

A team of scientists have created a pre-historic bread that ancient humans might have eaten more than 12,500 years ago in order to study the evolution.

The researchers are aiming to recreate the important moment in human evolution that probably gave away for rise of civilisations. The researchers used 12,500-year-old conical mortars that were found carved into bedrock and reconstructed how the ancient humans used wild barley to produce groat meals as well as a meal called "proto-pita", which is coal-baked and unleavened bread.

They recreated the moment in human evolution, the emergence of wild-grain-based nutrition, which occurred 2,000 to 3,000 years before humans started hunters began establishing farming communities. These farming communities went on to become the basis for the rise of future civilisations. Many believe that cereal domestication was achieved about 10,500 years ago. However, the current study showed that the humans started making groat meals and fine flour from wild barley about two to three millennia before the appearance of domesticated grains.

Mordechai Kislev of Bar-Ilan University said that scientists used mortars, like those carved into the bedrock throughout the Southern Levant, and other tolls form that age like wooden pestles, sticks and sieves to recreate how the work was done to create the bread.

Professor Kislev said, "The conical, human-made hollows, found all over Southeast Asia, were noticed by archaeologists decades ago, but there was no agreement about their function. Assuming they were mortars used for the processing of plant food, we decided to use these ancient stone tools, along with period-appropriate items such wooden pestles, sticks and sieves, to reconstruct how the work was done."

The authors including independent researchers David Eitam and AdielKarty, and their colleagues from Bar-Ilan University and Harvard University, conducted the study at the Late Natufian site of Huzuq Musa in Jordan Valley.