Bread requires a number of other tools, cooking techniques and inventions to come around before it makes sense that it was invented. It has definitely been around a long long time, but many inventions predate homosapien, and I doubt bread predates agriculture by much if at all.
What is interesting though is that what likely coincided with the invention of bread was the invention of beer. They’re a pretty small hop away from one another.
I see what you did there.
Its definitely an old invention, but maybe not quite as old as you might imagine, we have evidence of a good handful of things from before then
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions
Two things on that list in particular kind of stand out to me as obvious precursors to bread
Control of fire and cooking (2.3 million years ago) hard to bake without that unless maybe you live in a very volcanicaly active area or something where you can burry food in the ground or something to cook
Mortar and pestle (37 thousand years ago) gotta have some way of grinding grains into flour
Which leads us up to bread (14.5 thousand years ago)
Nice list. Would be cool to have one specifically for the prehistory of food.
Etymologically bread is not a native word in my current home country; but I just looked it up, they did have both flat and raised breads before, just called them differently.
And its the best invention. Why did we continue inventing stuff if we cant do better than our first attempt?
Well, it was the best invention. Then, someone sliced it.
Why are you on the internet if you could be eating bread?
Its too expensive now. It used to be €0.2, now its €0.34
I ran out
We started cultivating grain about twenty thousand years ago. We can identify stone tools from over three million years ago.
Bread was preceded by porridge (crushed grains in water or milk), which was preceded by gruel (raw, whole grains softened in water). Gruel also gave us beer.
To build on this, Wine predates all of it and likely lead to the discovery of yeast bread via contaminated grains stored near fermenting beer or wine.
Spear is probably older than that
Crab is older and some day, crab will be new again.
Everyone gangster until Crab:Remastered Drop.
Everybody want beef till the claws come out
