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→Early History of Bread
The earliest bread may have been made from cattails and ferns, where these plants were pounded into a fine substance using primitive mortars found that date to nearly 30,000 years ago. This suggests that even before the rise of agriculture, humans had begun to form a type of flour that they would then bake, perhaps in an open fire, to form bread. The earliest wheat and barley-based breads developed from pre-agricultural and agricultural societies in the Middle East, including in the Levant (Israel, Palestine, Syria), Turkey, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Iran by around 12,000 years ago. The earliest breads were likely unleavened. However, probably accidentally, leavened bread developed as yeast naturally occurring in the environment respires as it consumes natural sugars in wheat. Leavened bread is the release of gases by the yeast bacteria.
Already, with the development of the earliest breads, new technologies arose to help with the baking process. This included enclosed ovens and open ovens that used mud or brick to make a hot surface that flat breads could be prepared from a dough mix. Bread and earlier agricultural foods affected the development of many food preparation technologies, including mortar, pestles, querns, and mills. The production of bread led to many major changes in society, where production and processing of wheat and barely for bread and other foods transformed economies and social structures. Initially, the grinding of grain to flour would have been done by hand, often resulting in coarse grains. However, mills and large flat stones were used by early historical periods, perhaps by the 3rd millennium BCE, to make more refined flour. This helped bread to become less coarse. During the Classical period, there were many varieties of bread, ranging from sourdough, honey-and-oil bread, barley, wheat, poppy seeds, and even rolls.
==Changes to Bread==
