So How did Early Man Discover Bread?
All my life I’ve had a curiousity, a question, or just one of those “how” questions that kids always ask, that no-one has been able to answer. (Well either not being able to answer, or I never asked anyone).
How the hell did the first person bake bread? How the f**k did they accidentally discover wheat + grinding + baking = bread?
And now I might have found my answer…. in Seneca’s letters of all places:
For he tells us how the sage, by imitating the processes of nature, began to make bread. “The grain,”[15] he says, “once taken into the mouth, is crushed by the flinty teeth, which meet in hostile encounter, and whatever grain slips out the tongue turns back to the selfsame teeth. Then it is blended into a mass, that it may the more easily pass down the slippery throat. When this has readied the stomach, it is digested by the stomach’s equable heat; then, and not till then, it is assimilated with the body. Following this pattern,” he goes on, “someone placed two rough stones, the one above the other, in imitation of the teeth, one set of which is stationary and awaits the motion of the other set. Then by the rubbing of the one stone against the other, the grain is crushed and brought back again and again, until by frequent rubbing it is reduced to powder. Then this man sprinkled the meal with water, and by continued manipulation subdued the mass and moulded the loaf. This loaf was, at first, baked by hot ashes or by an earthen vessel glowing hot; later on ovens were gradually discovered and the other devices whose heat will render obedience to the sage’s will
Mind. Fucking. Blown.
I wonder why I’m into early civilization/ antropoligical questions like this? Ah well. Physics is still fun,
