How on earth did humans learn to bake? Presumably the short answer is “through trial and error”, but what possessed them to grind ears of wheat into flour in the first place? And then to mix it with water and yeast and cook it? Ellie Westcombe, London
Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.
Readers reply
This is just a small component of my giant, endless questioning about how the hell humans ever worked out anything, survival-wise. Eating the liver of fugu (puffer fish), for example. I mean, why? How? How many people died before they worked out which was the bit to reject? People are weird, I tell you. Weird. EBGB
Partly down to: we may die if we eat that, but we’ll definitely die if we don’t eat anything. I assume bread came about through grinding up seeds that were too tough to eat, perhaps for older members of the group, and adding water to make it more palatable. Once fire became consistently available, it’s not too hard to imagine someone finding you could make a sort of pancake on a hot stone, through accident or idle experimentation. If you’re short of food, you eat your accidents and experiments. And then, if you left your watery ground up grains around for a while, they’d sometimes ferment. You wouldn’t throw stuff out that had gone a bit weird and might discover that the fermented gloop tasted OK after you’d cooked it on a stone. All just-so stories, but it seems feasible over vast amounts of time. MattB13
Learning how to bake is straightforward. You don’t need a teacher, you just knead a bit of dough to get started. EddieChorepost
The earliest evidence of grinding grain and bread-making is from about 14,000 years ago in Jordan. It was wild varieties of wheats and barleys, mixed with starchy tubers. That’s long before any cereals were cultivated and before pottery was developed; an age with flint tools only. No yeast was needed, but they had fires and had been roasting meat for thousands of years, so the idea of cooking food to make it easier to digest was familiar. The great advantage of grains (along with nuts and any other collectable seeds) over fresh fruits is they can be stored for months between growing seasons when there might be little available to hunt and nothing fresh to gather. leadballoon
More interesting still – how did nomadic hunter-gatherers learn to stay in one place long enough to grow a wheat to make bread? Farming must be the single most socially disruptive invention ever – and there have been plenty of competitors. Randomusername222
Ask Yuval Noah Harari. He writes in Sapiens that wheat domesticated humans, not the other way round. WaveletFRA
Gruel, a porridge or barley or wheat or both, in the climate of ancient Egypt, would ferment with wild yeasts and then make a very thick rising dough if left to dry in the heat of the midday sun. This could be transported, whereas gruel can’t. Thus deliberate baking was a refinement – evolution, not revolution. Bread from ancient Egyptian tombs has the density of something like rye bread; pretty solid. Evidently, the process was still being learned. Gruel left over in the UK’s climate doesn’t ferment, it just goes mouldy. But bread was created in the hot countries of the fertile crescent, where nature lends a hand. Socialismnow
