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Comment by phonypc | Hacker News Reader

Eh, the modern-ish notion (tomato sauce and cheese topping) of pizza maybe. Topped flatbreads called pizza are much older, and topped flatbreads in general are again much older than that.

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If you draw comparisons to say, tortillas(i do), they go way, way back, at least 12k years if wiki is to be believed.

Grain that's ground, mixed with water and cooked is definitely one of the earliest processed foods humans created. Easily 10's of thousands of years old. The entire agricultural revolution occurred because humans wanted to farm grains; some historians say to make beer, but whether beer or bread came first both are connected (both are basically just water + grain + yeast + heat).

Don’t forget the salt!

Seems like salt was only invented 8000 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt

That seems basically impossible. Salt is really easy to find many places, its taste is _very_ obvious, and it's insanely useful (preserving food).

I'd buy that we don't have great _evidence_ of its harvesting before that, which seems more like what the article says? But that's not really the same thing at all.

Invented?!

Let me tell you about when Hydrogen was invented 13 Billion years ago.

Do we have archeological records of this prior to development of language?

Seems like a fairly complex tech to pass on without some fairly involved language?

It is widely agreed that the development of language goes back at least 50k-150k years ago, so way before that time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language

Just a margin of error of 100k years. Not bad.

Language, or the beginnings of it, is probably older than bread. But bread in its simplest form is not complex at all, I feel like you could hypothetically teach it to an early hominid without language. Just pound something starchy into a paste, maybe add some water and work it into a dough and cook it on some rocks.

I've heard reports of orangutans learning how to fish with a spear by observing humans.

I wonder sometimes if we could teach them to make bread or baked plantains or something, idk, and then have that habit passed on to their offspring.

The sticking point could be fire, seems rather hard to make, and even worse - maintain, without all the convenient tools we have today.

> I've heard reports of orangutans learning how to fish with a spear by observing humans.

They imitate the behavior, and you can easily find some pretty cool pictures of it. However, I'm not sure an orangutan has ever actually caught a fish that way.

We have archaeological records of bread prior to written records (archaeologists found a 14k year old fragment of bread) but language itself likely developed long, long before writing.

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