Headline: Archaeologists discover bread that predates agriculture by 4,000 years.

The obvious way to have bread without agriculture is to use wild grains, and indeed, this 14,400-year-old flatbread was made from wild ancestors of barley, einkorn, and oats that had been ground, sieved, and kneaded prior to cooking.

I’m stretching my mind thinking about a person scraping the charred food off those ancient stones, oblivious to their repurposing 700 generations hence. I will tip my hat to my possibly-significant trash barrel next time I walk through the kitchen. Think of the treasure in the association dumpster!

Clearly I believe that our current age will fade into oblivion as surely as have all other ages of our species. I realize a lot of folks think our sentient computers will be able to maintain our most innocuous data for eternity. I say, Hooey.

Kudos to science, which can now “identify the remains of bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification,” according to the article. Making bread from wild grains would have been lots of work, a “special” food. Maybe there was a party that night.

Analysis was done in the UK, but the collection was done by scientists from Denmark, who have a grant to study how foods were used during the transition from hunter/gatherer to farmer. Close readers of this blog know that, unlike most Westerners, I think this transition was a bad thing in terms of work/leisure ratio, nutrient diversity, and egalitarian social structures. That is, unless you think more work, less nutrient diversity, and greater social stratification are good things.

I should watch my assumptions.

People in favor of the agricultural revolution and human hierarchy–I’ll call them civilization fiends–also tend to think that although our brains are getting smaller, we are still getting smarter. Yes folks, that’s a thing: We have lost 150 cc, or about 10%, of our brain size in the last 10-20,000 years. It’s the volumetric equivalent of a tennis ball. There are lots of theories about both cause and result, lots, with no clear leaders yet. I like the Idiocracy theory, which is, That movie was accurate.

At this rate of reduction, in another 20,000 years we’ll have brains the size of Homo erectus. I’m going to skip all the quips that just came to mind.

I’m reading Genius Foods, which posits that we evolved with our food for 150,000 years or so then abruptly limited our diet to the few things we can cultivate or tame, simultaneously dropping the daily challenges of hunting and gathering for the mind-numbing Sow; Nurture; Reap; Repeat. The authors definitely equate smaller brain with dumber brain.

They also have a plan for reversal of brain fog, if not brain shrinkage–check it out!