Traditionally, people made bread from whatever grain grew best in the area where they lived. Because of the climate, soil and other conditions, different grains grow better in certain regions of the world. Wheat, rye, corn, barley, millet, kamut and spelt are some of the grains used around the world.
Ever since people began to migrate from Africa to West Asia, about 70,000 BC, they have probably always eaten wheat, which tastes good and is also a good source of carbohydrates. But for hundreds of thousands of years, people did not grow wheat intentionally. They just picked wheat wild, wherever it happened to grow.
Sometime around 10,000 BC though, the area around Mesopotamia and Egypt became crowded enough, and the climate hot enough, that there was no longer enough food to go around just by picking it, and people had to begin growing it on purpose. In what is now known as the Fertile Crescent, the oldest archaeological evidence for wheat cultivation comes from Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Armenia, and Iraq. Around 9,000 years ago, wild einkorn wheat was harvested and domesticated in the first archaeological signs of sedentary farming in the Fertile Crescent. Wild einkorn wheat still grows in the Fertile Crescent.
Around 8,000 years ago, a mutation or hybridization occurred within emmer wheat, resulting in a plant with seeds that were larger but could not sow themselves on the wind. While this plant could not have succeeded in the wild, it produced m ...
