Bread that was left uncooked 8,600 years ago in Turkey’s Çatalhöyük dubbed as world’s oldest

8,600 years ago, a baker in Turkey mixed flour and water to make bread dough, pressed it to check its readiness and then didn’t bake it. This particular bread that was left uncooked near an oven has now been dubbed as the world’s oldest by archaeologists.

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According to Necmettin Erbakan University’s Science and Technology Research and Application Center (BİTAM), archaeologists have discovered a furnace structure at the Çatalhöyük archaeological site in the Konya province of southern Turkey. The structure was found in an area called Mekan 66, which contains adjoining mudbrick houses. Apart from the bread, wheat, barley, pea seeds, and a palm-sized thing that could have been food were also found at the site. The spongy residue of the bread dates back to 6,600 BC.

“We can say that this find at Çatalhöyük is the oldest bread in the world,” archaeologist Ali Umut Türkcan, head of the Excavation Delegation and an associate professor at Anadolu University in Turkey, told Turkish state news outlet Anadolu Agency.

He added, “It is a smaller version of a loaf of bread. It has a finger pressed in the centre; it has not been baked, but it has been fermented and has survived to the present day with the starches inside. There is no similar example of something like this to date.”

Gaziantep University lecturer Salih Kavak, one of the academicians who contributed to the find, explained, “I was very surprised when they brought it. Because in this form, ‘Could dough, bread, be an organic residue?’ I thought. I made a morphological diagnosis with the naked eye, then I immediately looked at the contents under the microscope."

He added, "The most exciting thing is that there are grain residues. There are ground and broken pieces of plants such as barley, wheat and peas. What we thought at first was, ‘I wonder if this is bread.’ It strengthened the possibility.”

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He further expressed, “Analyzes showed that this find was mixed with water and flour, left for a while, fermented and uncooked. We saw that it was in that form, prepared next to the oven but not baked or cooked. It was an exciting find. There is no find in this form similar to bread found so far. We call it the oldest known bread. It is an exciting discovery for Turkey and the world.”

Both wood at the site and bread were preserved by thin clay that covered the structure, according to archaeologist Türkcan.