Who invented bread?

The first-known leavened bread made with semi-domesticated yeast dates back to around 1000 BC in Egypt.

Unlike chocolate chip cookies or tomato soup, the invention of bread can’t be pinned down to a single person. Instead, it evolved to its present state over the course of millennia.Although the modern version of sliced bread is a fairly new invention (Wonder Bread began marketing the first sliced loaf of bread in 1930), bread itself is an ancient food with origins dating back more than 22,000 years.

In 2004, at an excavation site called Ohalo II (modern-day Israel), scientists found 22,000-year-old barley grains caught in a grinding stone — the first evidence of humans processing wild cereal grains.

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But these early bread creations were probably more like flat cakes of ground seeds and grains heated on a rock, or in the embers of a fire, than standard sandwich bread.Bread grains, the first plants to be domesticated, were first harvested in the wild by the Natufians (this Mesolithic group of hunter-gatherers lived in the Jordan River Valley region of the Middle East about 12,500 years ago).

Over the next several thousand years, agriculture and the cultivation of grains spread across the Middle East and southwest Asia through trade contacts with other hunter-gatherer peoples in the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia and east of the Indus Valley.

More than 5,000 years after the Natufians began making flatbread, three civilizations rapidly grew and expanded during the Bronze Age — the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians (modern-day Iraq) and the Harappans in the Indus Valley (modern-day Pakistan). All three civilizations, considered the largest in the ancient world, depended on bread.

The first-known leavened bread made with semi-domesticated yeast dates back to around 1000 BC in Egypt. However, evidences also suggest that Mesopotamians also produced yeast-risen bread.