WORLD'S OLDEST BREAD has been found at ÇATALHÖYÜK - or has it?

[Music] hello welcome everybody it's Michael bot here and it's and Rupert saskin here yes uh the prehistory guys as ever bringing you old stuff from around the world uh today we're bringing you uh old bread um in something that old very old old bread something that has not been picked up too largely in the mainstream uh media surprise surprise consider you'd have thought there'd be more interest in this but we've picked it up I suppose particularly because rer tell the good folks why well well yeah it's it's funny it's this is at Shad hoyuk in uh um in South Central turkey and uh of course we're not long back uh from uh from there we you know we visited Chad Hoy uh and if we'd only known that that this was going to be cropping up uh so chatt ho if you don't know uh it's it's a Proto City really it's a huge settlement the site itself extends over 34 Acres roughly uh so what's that 14 hectares is it something like that 15 so they've been Excavating there for a very long time and there are debates about how many people might have been living there but it's certainly numbers in in the thousands uh busy place and they have found now they're calling it the oldest uh bread in the world it's not quite true um but it is the oldest leavened bread they were um fermenting it so uh and they found this in an oven uh well the remains of an oven um and they're saying it was the clay that's actually the surrounding clay that's actually protected this bread it's I'll read from the uh the article I've got I've got well I've got an article which was on the CNN uh website it's also worth mentioning is that chattel ho is of course one of the earliest sites that displays evidence of uh farming you know of the domestic domestication of animals and the domestication of of Wheats and cereals Etc so it's it's if any if you're going to find the earliest bread anywhere chutle hoic would be a good place to to to look but even you know with the likelihood of it being so the fact that it has been found I think is quite extraordinary anyway uh the headline of this particular article says world's oldest bread dating back 8,600 years uh discovered in Turkey it says uh a largely destroyed oven structure was found in an area called mechan 66 actually I think the mechan is the Turkish word for space so if you look in the English archaeological records that um plans for for um catalic they're divided into spaces and buildings and it's space 66 where uh there are adjoining mudbrick houses uh at the archaeological side of chattel ho in the southern Turkish province of K according to turkey's NEC mettin erban univers University science and technology research and application center that's a mouthful isn't it and apologies for pronunciation well done of uh words that aren't in my language uh around the oven archaeologists found wheat barley pea seeds and palm-sized round and a round and a palm-sized round spongy residue it said in a press release on Wednesday analyses determined that the organic residue was 6 8,600 year old uncooked fermented bread we can say that this find at chattle ho is the oldest bread in the world archaeologist Ali umut token head of the excavation delegation and an associate professor at anadu University in Turkey told turkey state news about anoo agency Outlet anadu Agency on Wednesday don't need all that kind of detail so oldest bread in the world as you were early on as you did at the top of the the show start qualifying that yes should we qualify that a bit further yeah uh we should qualify that because um as said you okay this this is certainly the earliest known leavened uh bread but unleavened bread we know that the natufians uh a little bit uh uh to the south and east that uh they were making bread a lot longer ago and in fact the earliest uh bread found uh there is uh in uh Northeastern Jordan at a site called uh shua uh or sh I'm not sure which sha is it uh well I don't know it's a a y I'm going to call it it's got to be sha because baking with bread shoe baking yes shoe Baker he's a shoe Baker it's it's it's a a [Music] memoir but the thing is that whilst these are so this is unli these are flat breads that they were making but they date back 14 half thousand years yeah so put that you know Ju Just reiterate the dates for chatal hoyak and the dates for shaba we're talking about how many years difference well so you you've got at its height uh chatt hoyak dates to 9,000 years ago and uh and at uh sha we're talking about 14 a half thousand years ago so 5 and a half thousand years further back making bread uh which is staggering really but well yes I me it's staggering considering what the nans were up to and the way they were subsisting we we could do a whole other program about you know the way that the lead up to uh domestic Agriculture and far we kind of know it I suppose it's also worth um pointing out that because at chattle Hoya uh you know they had got into actual farming uh that's a significant difference CU it meant that they could have been making bread from a single chosen crop as opposed to uh you look at the nuian Breads and and they were harvested uh wild grains and uh I have a list here actually if you bear with me uh so so the flatbreads they said resembling Pitter bread really uh and they were made with wild cereal such as barley in horn or oats as well as tubers from an aquatic Papyrus relative uh they've all been found ground into flour so uh you know uh maybe not single crop uh like wheat but uh but you know the nans they were hot on their bread yeah the nans were hot on quite a few things weren't they well exactly I was going to say while we're talking about early bread with the two things go hand in hand uh early breu um cuz it's uh if you look at sha hopefully I'll sort of place that on a map for you 150 miles to the west of that over in Israel uh at a place called raka cave um are the earliest signs of of Brewing uh little pits and silos inside a cave mouth show residues um from from Brewing um so and it we are told inevitably that the two things go hand in hand side by side uh they're both the production of bread and the production of beer you know the they're side products of one another um so which came first that's the question I think uh I think rakefet the the evidence for Brewing there goes back is it 13,000 years I think yeah um so you we've liked our beer for a very long time yes um anyway going back to bread at CH huk uh you said uh it is a smaller version of a loaf of bread thing that they found uh it has a finger um print pressed in the center it had has not been baked but it has been fermented and it survived to the present day with the starches still inside and there's no similar example of anything like this to date uh he added as a sidebar it's also worth mentioning that you I hinted at the top you know how extraord you find like this is and if you you know as we have we've stood and looked at the area within which this was found I think it's found in in the uh in in the northern uh uh excavation on the top of the East Mound is to to find this in excavation and that's it's not a you know it's not a very big thing is quite extraordinary because you need Specialists on site to be able to determine and what it is that you've found you know when you're digging stuff out of the ground everything looks the same you know well you mean things have got different hardnesses different textures and all the rest of it but unless you've got your eye in and you know what you're looking at it's very easy you know perhaps to discard something that may be um you know of great interest I'm tell you what though the converse is is true as well I've been digging away and think oh oh look what I found bit of burnt Stone Chuck it away you know that goes on on a lot but I say that because it's worth mentioning that uh chutle HK I mean presumably because it's such a large excavation but it's one of the first places where you've got uh um many many disciplines scientific disciplines represented on site yeah that's certainly true in SS of bioarchaeology and and and yeah all kinds of Sciences so people with a specialist eye are able to look at things that come out of the ground it's not every excavation can have that kind of uh intensity intensity of gaze on on what's going on so it's another reason why yes a chatle h is always going to be presenting us with stuff out of the ground uh that is extraordinary because of the size of the site but also you've got the people there you know with the right eyes uh that are going to discern this this kind of thing um so scanning electron microscope images showed that the spaces in the sample um uh they can see the starch grains uh eliminating our suspicions biologist so here we go biologist uh CA kavak a lecturer at gaziantep University in Turkey said in the release uh he added that the analyses uncovered chemicals found in plants and indicators of fer fermentation flour and water had been mixed in with the bread having been prepared next to the oven and kept for a while it's an exciting Discovery for turkey and the world well uh it is it is and you got to keep it sort of in context we're lucky to be looking at chatt hoyak but chattel hoyak is probably not the epicenter of everything bread Wise It's the sites that the excavations that haven't been done the SES that haven't been uncovered you you know that probably provide evidence of bread production going stretching back in time and the development of it we don't have access to everything every bit of archaeological evidence ever produced in fact we only have access to a tiny tiny tiny percentage of stuff I think one of the uh one of the nice things here though is that having found this at chatt Hoak and having found the remains of an oven that uh bearing in mind that it's another one of the sites that you know they've still only excavated a really small percentage of the entire site yeah uh so it's it is it's that little tease isn't it of go what else is there to be found under this you know it's um it's very exciting and whether or it'll ever be all uncovered because the scale of these Heights is uh hard to appre and of course the kind of EXC ation that's going on this detail this takes years and years and years to excavate very small I know people get frustrated by the slow nature of archaeology but even with large teams working on you know comparatively small spaces it takes a long long time to get down uh through the layers and record the layers and unless you that's going on you never have fines like this yeah so hat off you're saying that absolutely hats off archaeologist you saying that it's it's a really good point isn't it that you know when if you've seen archaeologists working in the field and it's this meticulous you know taking away of a bit of soil at a time and a bit at a time and a bit at a time and you go and look at Chad hoyak and you see I can't remember the actual depth of the excavations but is it it's something like I don't know is it 30 ft or something of depth I mean it's staggering when you think that you're taking it back just a scrape at a time and they've gone down something like 10 m anyway it might not be quite that much but but it's staggering depth yeah yeah yeah um so as you say the length of time it takes to uh to do that so carefully and meticulously in case you destroy something important yeah unfortunately we weren't able to spend as much time at chattel H as we would have uh would have liked um but we do have footage um to uh you know um to show you and we'll be putting together a program about chattle Hoak in the not too distant uh future um yeah amazing site amazing spot oh by the way while while we're talking about turkey and chatel Hoak and you know I think gcae may have been mentioned at some point uh have a look in the description below you'll find a link to our project which is called Stone GOC to Stonehenge u in which we're piecing together the story of the ne lithic because it uh came across the aan and the Mediterranean and through Europe and up the danu and uh across to eventually producing Stonehenge if I can put it that way um if You' like to support us doing that do have a look at that link and also have a look at our uh patreon page link down below as well and before we go just uh uh like And subscribe that'd be nice too every little bit helps thanks so much all helps yeah uh with that I think it is time to say bye-bye unless there's something I miss I don't think there is uh no I don't think so oldest L bread there you go take care folks thanks for watching bye-bye

Channel: The Prehistory Guys

Views: 8,574

Keywords: the prehistory guys, the prehistory guys youtube, michael bott, rupert soskin, ancient history, prehistoric archaeology, prehistory videos, archaeologist interviews, ancient mysteries, prehistoric man, worlds ol, world's oldest bread, oldest bread found in turkey, origins of bread, world's first beer, oldest beer in the world, bread found at catalhoyuk, catalhoyuk earliest bread, excavations at catalhoyuk, shubayqa 1, raqefet cave, raqefet cave beer, raqefet cave brewing

Id: COfvgNv46Nc

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024