I am trying to comprehend how something that required methodical steps and ‘good luck’ came to be a staple of civilisations for thousands of years. Thank you. (Sorry if this question isn’t correct for ELI5, I searched and couldn’t find it asked. Hope it’s in-bounds.)
In: 1505
Not too tricky. Birds eat seeds from grasses all the time. So we knew it was edible, we just didn’t know how. So one of the earliest developments would have been to boil it and eat it like cereal. After that it’s not much of a leap to grind it and make cakes, because that same cereal, when cooled, will become cakes anyway.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs&ab_channel=PeterPringle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs&ab_channel=PeterPringle)
Peter Pringle is an ancient Sumerian scholar and musician.
If you read the lyrics of the epic of Gilgamesh, the lyrics say something like” In those ancient days….when the first ovens (bread) had been lit, so you can only imagine how old bread making is if its ancient in the epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Sumeria.
If that blows your mind – think about the person that put some fish guts in a bottle let it ferment for the number of weeks and then decided to put it in their dinner
Hunter gatherers ate nuts, berriers and other gathered things.
Wheatgrass was essentially a grass with 1-3 small seeds, but wheatgrass could grow where no verdant nut plants that require lots of water cannot. This helped during seasonal migrations to hunt game. Wheatseeds also store for a long time if you could spend time to gather them. Pre-cultivation wheat dropped seeds on touch to the ground so gatherers would have to be careful. When the early cultivators learned they could select better plants for breeding each time they selected plants that had a stronger connection to the stalk from the seed that could be easily picked.
When you crushed the seeds to water you could make a paste that you could dry that would raise your blood sugar and feel good to eat. And making the drying process faster by drying by fire they would learn how to make bread, initially. Also the wet seed paste would ferment to make it last for a longer time and the bacterial process would increase the digestability and calorie intake.
Weve had 200,000 years to figure it out and no internet or electricity for most of those years
Bored humans are capable of finding out a lot
I’d also add that its pretty clear that some humans will try doing literally everything just to see what happens. The instinct to press the big red button that says “do not, under any circumstances, press this button” is universal, or at least common. The curiosity required to develop technology didn’t suddenly emerge in the last 300 years, we just gained access to a wider range of materials and more energy sources to bang them together and see what comes out.
I don’t buy the “happy accident” theories of early agricultural technology at all (leftovers thrown on the fire / wheat left out in the rain). My view is that if it could be done with the resources available at the time, someone would be curious enough to try it.
Remember we’ve evolved over millions of years, in the vast majority of those there was no TV or iPhones to distract us all day.
I read somewhere that the thing that truly set us apart from other animals and even primates was that knowledge was passed down generation to generation and built upon.
Humans have a relatively long adolescence and childhood which is incredibly costly in terms of evolution but in exchange we got tremendous amounts of knowledge and safety and resources to build upon.
A million monkeys at a million typewriters, but they’re all hungry.
Someone has literally eaten, dried, dismantled, ground, cooked, braised, battered, roasted, smoked, fried, everything, combined with everything else. Millions of years before entertainment, writing, we had the same overall brains, so learning, testing, experimenting was entertainment.
Because anyone who’s hungry enough will try to eat anything at least once, even that weird grass outside.
Keep growing the weird grass untul it gets bigger.
Anyone with lots of food who’s bored enough will try random food preparation techniques until something they like gets made.
Multiply it by hundreds/thousands of years and you get a civilization with bread.
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