Why, according to science, bread and wine have been consumed together since the Stone Age

For many people, a meal is complete without a glass of good malbec and a few crispy slices of bread.

And it turns out we have our Late Stone Age ancestors to thank for developing both ingredients around the same time.

Scientists have just discovered the oldest evidence that ancient people planted vineyards – 11,000 years ago, the same time they started growing wheat.

It is well documented that humans began domesticating wheat about eleven thousand years ago.

However, earlier archaeological evidence suggests that at least another 2,500 years passed before people began to domesticate vines and other fruit trees, which appeared somewhere between 5,500 and 8,500 years ago.

Now scientists have made a discovery that could explain why wine and bread are so inextricably linked.

They found that humans started planting vineyards much earlier than previously thought — around the same time they started planting wheat 11,000 years ago.

Thus, both the cultivation of wheat and the cultivation of wine can now be attributed to the people of the early Neolithic – the latter was formerly attributed to the middle Neolithic.

The Neolithic period, which is the last part of the Stone Age, is generally considered to have lasted from 12,000 to 2,500 years ago, suggesting that the same part of history is responsible for the cultivation of grapes and wheat.

“The previous consensus was that the domestication of perennial fruit trees, such as the vine, lagged behind the domestication of annual crops, and archaeological evidence dates the domestication of perennial fruit crops to 8,500 to 5,500 years ago,” said Wei Chen of Yunnan Agricultural University. China, according to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

“However, our estimate, based on genomic data, is that the period of domestication of the vine falls at about the same time that humans domesticated crops.”

The study is published in the journal Science.

Dr. Chen adds that domestication occurred simultaneously in two places: “about 11,000 years ago in Western Asia and the Caucasus for the production of table and vine plants.”

The Caucasus includes a group of countries between the Black and Caspian Seas, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and parts of southern Russia.

Dr. Chen says itinerant farmers are probably responsible for our wide range of wines in Western Europe, which they bring to Europe from Western Asia.

Grapevines “then evolved along human migration routes into nutmeg and the unique ancestors of the western wine grape by the Late Neolithic,” he said.

Wine grapes in the Balkans can be dated to 8700 years, in Spain and Portugal to 7740 years, and in Western Europe to 6910 years.