I can understand how early humans were attracted to colorful fruits and berries as food, or they might have observed animals and birds eating them. Likewise wild animals eating meat.
When one considers how wheat has to be thrashed, ground to flour and then baked to make anything edible, how in the world did anybody figure this out?
Are there any extant theories on this? Googling provided thousands of hits but no theories.
Actually, I’m pretty sure you can eat it raw. It’s just that you probably don’t want to.
And at least some types of wheat can be eaten without grinding or baking (they just need to be prepared and boiled), and are quite good that way. So–assuming that early wheat was like that–even if they didn’t like it raw it wouldn’t have taken that much work to discover it as a food.
[Wild Speculation]
My guess would be that the discovery of rice as a food came first. Perhaps early man saw animals (birds?) eating it and tred it out. Over time they would have figured out that by pounding on it a bit you can get the individual rices separated out easier. One can also imagine that beating on the rice in a big granite bowl might have created a good bit of rice flour. And instead of wasting this, they tried adding some water and found out it becomes a sort of dough–which cooked can be made into noodles and such.
Once you’ve discovered this process with rice, probably it wouldn’t be a big leap to try it with other grains.
[/Wild Speculation]
Someone will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that wheat and rice were domesticated independently in different parts of the world: wheat in the Fertile Crescent, and rice in China. Both domestications took place long before any major trade contact between the two (~8500 B.C. for the Fertile Cresent, ~7500 B.C. for China), so I don’t think the domestication of one would have necessarily given early agriculturalists any ideas for the domestication of the other.
(Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond — probably the most-cited book on this message board…)
Actually, the birds were mostly into small insects and worms, and saw us eating seeds. They thought we had a supply of dead maggots. They don’t call them bird brains for nothing.
I have a WAG that might be better suited for the “Specutation with no support thread,” but since this is not a question which has a real definitive answer, here goes:
I don’t think bread was made first, I think - don’t be grossed out - we ate wheat and other grains out of the stomachs of dead animals first. A hunted herbivore will have partially digested grains in it’s stomach when you slaughter it.
Eating those yummy treats may have given someone the idea to pick the wheat berries directly, but they’re really too hard to be pleasant to eat. So, since the partially digested ones were broken and wet and soft, someone added water or blood to grains they cracked open with a rock, making a gruel of sorts.
Now here’s where it gets really whacky: someone left some thick gruel out. It got all bubbly and funny smelling. Obviously ruined, right? Throw it into the fire, it’s garbage.
Except, when thrown near the fire, it got all puffy and yummy smelling. Some brave soul tried the cooked puffy spoiled gruel on a dare.
And it was good. 
If your WAG depends upon someone taking the contents of a dead animal’s stomach, eating it, and leaving some of it so sit around until it’s “obviously ruined”… I dunno, that doesn’t seem so obvious to me. 
I meant “obviously ruined” in the caveman sense of “smells rotten and might make you sick.” Stuff found in stomachs is perfectly safe and edible and doesn’t smell at all rotten unless it’s been sitting around awhile. It’s where wild dogs and other “carnivores” get the small amount of grains they need to be healthy. When you have to work hard for your calories, you don’t turn away perfectly good food!
C’mon, there are people who consider eyeballs and fish ova to be delicacies!
Fermenting bread smells rotten?
If it’s fermenting with a whole spectrum of wild yeasts and bacteria, probably yes.
Actually, I think it’s more likely that leavened bread is an accidental byproduct of unleavened* bread.
My farmer buddy in Kansas showed me that you can take raw wheat kernels and chew them into a poor substitute for gum. They will stick together and make a lasting lump.
It’s higher in fibre than regular gum, too!
In my experience, more probably no.
And, again in my experience, if one is hungry, and you have food, you don’t throw it out, no matter how disgusting.
I can’t find the cite, but I do recall reading recently that archeologists had found evidence of humans eating grains (I think it was a form of wheat) as far back as 25k years ago. Not cultivation, but eating.
I suspect the original hunter-gatherers tried pretty much everything and learned what was good by trial and error. That’s the neat thing about language, memory and gregariousness. Gregarious animals live in groups. If Alley Oop finds something good he tells others and they remember it. Next time the gathering is a little easier because they know one more thing to look for.
People have been eating grass seeds for at least 30, 000 years. That means they have been doing it long before they had agriculture. It also means they have been doing it long before they had pottery or the ability to boil water. The thing to remember is that humans and our ancestors have always been highly omnivorous and highly curious about food. Savanna chimpanzees today still routinely eat grass seeds, adding a lot of credence to the idea that our species has always eaten them… Various hominids have modified the collection and preparation techniques by adding fire, grinding, milling and the use of genetically modified probiotic fermentation vats but really that is just tinkering with a food source that ha been know for hundreds of millions of years, not a new discovery of a food source
The reason why we know that modern humans have been eating grass seeds for at least 30, 000 years is that we have found grindstones dating back at leat that far. Considering that grindstones are both heavy and fragile the chances of actually finding such objects are fairly remote, so the probability is that Homo sapiens has been eating ground grass seeds since before our species existed.
And of course people were still processing grass seeds in exactly the same manner up until a mere century ago, so we have pretty good idea of how they did it, and it’s not complicated. The seeds were collected by hand into a wooden bowl and winnowed by simply tossing into the breeze. The seeds were then ground between two rocks. Mixed with some water or often simply spit and then baked by throwing onto the fire or onto a hot rock. The concept of bread and fermentation seems to have been a very modern invention dating form after the first semi=permanent settlements.
As for how anyone figured this out, we can never know. Of course we can ask the same question about how someone knew that you could take a moving chunk of protein, bash its skull in and burn it to make food. Or how someone knew that you could break open an acorn and extract food.
It has been speculated that hand grinding of any food was discovered in preparing food for infants or the infirm. It was fairly common in many primitive societies to prepare baby food or food for the ill by simply pre-chewing whatever was available, spitting it into the hand and feeding it to the other person. Sometimes it was simply transferred directly mouth to mouth. Someone at some stage came up with the idea that more food could be processed faster by grinding than by chewing. To me that seems like a failry logical leap to make, particularly if you have to prepare enough ‘baby food’ to provide for an ill adult. That’s a lot of chewing.
Of course once grinding was available its benefits soon became clear. Ground grain is far more digestible and hence has a much higher energy value. The same would have been true for cooking. Uncooked grain is largely indigestible to modern humans, and you could probably starve to death living on just uncooked wheat. Cooking makes it far more digestible.
As for the idea that grains were discovered as food from gut contents, it really makes no sense to me. As I’ve pointed out, chimps still eat grass seeds so it’s a reasonable guess that our ancestors did likewise. There’s no need to make them wet and semi-rotten to make them edible. The other problem is that before permanent settlements small animals weren’t gutted, they were thrown onto the fire whole. Large animals were butchered because obviously a whole elephant can’t be thrown onto a fire, but if the tribe has a whole elephant it isn’t going to be worrying about preserving gut contents. The only time I can; see where gut contents might be viewed as a food of desperation would be in a far northern winter where a whole elephant carcasse could be preserved. The problem with that is that in northern winters there won’t be enough grain around to fill an animal’s gut.
Before the wheat berry is fully ripe or mature it is still soft and easily chewed. Many varieties are sweet and delicious before they become dry.
Groats on the otherhand are easly chewed in their dry state and I love to eat a handfull on occasion. If I was a hunter gaterer I would think this would be a top treat. It wouldent take long to try different ways to eat your favorate foods.
You dont have to thrash and grind and bake to eat grass seeds.
I can knock out a whole hand full of unripe wheatberries in just a couple minuts, pop them in my mouth and off I go. When they ripen I cant seem to chew them as well. So I boil them or I decide to pound them with a stone or somehting. Opps I pounded to much and got flour. I cook it up and accedently make somthing good like bread or crackers.
IIRC, when the Rift Valley rifted, the primates in the jungle side developed into the great apes, while the primates on the grassland side developed into homo sapiens (walking erect to see over the grass, developing lower body strength for walking at the expense of upper body strength not needed for tree climbing, etc.), and, with less edible vegitation, developing a taste for the animals of the grasslands: first as carrion; then as organized hunting groups (possibly learned from our new companion, the dog); then as *transhumance nomads, following the herds as they sought fresh grass; then as nomadic herders, where we put ourselves in control of migration, instead of as just followers.
Somehere in there, somebody must have decided to eat what the animals were eating, and eventually took some of the tastier seeds of wild *eincorn and planted them in pastures to which they knew they’d eventually return. Ultimately, some of these prepared pastures were so fruitful that people (probably the women) said “let’s just stay here and keep planting.”
*I know: using words like “transhumance” and “eincorn” are a pretty pathetic bid for GQ credibility. Although I do like WhyNot’s “Try this grainy stuff I found in the guts - Hey Mikey! He likes it!” theory. Maybe we got the idea for cheese from the contents of suckling calves’ stomachs.
Slithy Tove the problem with what you just posted is that it totally ignores what I’ve already pointed out. The biggest problem is that chimpanzees already eat grass seeds so it seems incredible to suggest that our first hominid ancestors lost this trait for some reason and had to reacquire it. That’s particularly improbable given that our ancestors probably lived in environments with even more grass seeds then even savanna chimps have access to.
The next problem is the idea that at some stage hominids decided to eat what ‘animals’ were eating. The trouble is that hominids were always just animals and were never exclusively carnivorous. Our ancestors always ate whatever food was available whether other animals wanted to eat it or not. There was never some magical point at which we stopped eating some ‘ideal’ diet and started eating a variety of foods including grains and tubers.
The history of cheese isn’t known of course but it’s pretty unlikely it comes from the gut of dead calves. Rather it seems probable that rennet cheese developed from the common practice of using organs as water bags. The use of a calf of kid’s stomach to store milk would inevitably produce cheese.