Archaeologists have found charred bread crumbs in a couple of 14,000-year-old fireplaces in Jordan's Black Desert. They're tiny crumbs, but they're bread crumbs all the same, dated using radiocarbon dating.

Digging at a site in the northeast part of the country between 2012 and 2015, the team of archaeologists, including Tobias Richter of the University of Copenhagen, found charred remains of 642 lumps of plants and legumes. A total of 24 of those lumps were found to be bread-like, and 15 contain bits from cereal plants, like barley or oats or wheat. Also present were several types of plant material, such as the wetland club-rush.

Further analysis convinced the archaeologists that the ancient people who made the bread used sieved flour and that the bread would have been baked on a hot stone or in the ashes of a fire.

The site was known to be used by a group of hunter-gatherers known as the Natufians, who, the archaeologists say, would have made bread sparingly because its gathering and processing would have been very labor-intensive. Rather, the theory goes, the bread would have been made specially, as for a ritual event. The Natufians themselves populated the Levant from 14,000 years ago until about 11,000 years ago and are thought to have founded the city of Jericho.

Richter and others on the team said that the find was especially illuminating because the current placing of the development of agriculture in the region was 3,000 years later.