this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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52
Bread is probably one of the oldest human inventions (at least that we can clearly identify) (lemmy.zip)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Its definitely an old invention, but maybe not quite as old as you might imagine, we have evidence of a good handful of things from before then

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions

Two things on that list in particular kind of stand out to me as obvious precursors to bread

Control of fire and cooking (2.3 million years ago) hard to bake without that unless maybe you live in a very volcanicaly active area or something where you can burry food in the ground or something to cook

Mortar and pestle (37 thousand years ago) gotta have some way of grinding grains into flour

Which leads us up to bread (14.5 thousand years ago)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Nice list. Would be cool to have one specifically for the prehistory of food.

Etymologically bread is not a native word in my current home country; but I just looked it up, they did have both flat and raised breads before, just called them differently.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Bread requires a number of other tools, cooking techniques and inventions to come around before it makes sense that it was invented. It has definitely been around a long long time, but many inventions predate homosapien, and I doubt bread predates agriculture by much if at all.

What is interesting though is that what likely coincided with the invention of bread was the invention of beer. They're a pretty small hop away from one another.

[–] Qubbe 3 points 2 days ago

I see what you did there.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 days ago

We started cultivating grain about twenty thousand years ago. We can identify stone tools from over three million years ago.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Bread was preceded by porridge (crushed grains in water or milk), which was preceded by gruel (raw, whole grains softened in water). Gruel also gave us beer.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago

To build on this, Wine predates all of it and likely lead to the discovery of yeast bread via contaminated grains stored near fermenting beer or wine.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Spear is probably older than that

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Crab is older and some day, crab will be new again.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Everyone gangster until Crab:Remastered drop.

[–] RandomVideos 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

And its the best invention. Why did we continue inventing stuff if we cant do better than our first attempt?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why are you on the internet if you could be eating bread?

[–] RandomVideos 1 points 2 days ago

Its too expensive now. It used to be €0.2, now its €0.34
I ran out

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well, it was the best invention. Then, someone sliced it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

And then some genius cooked it AGAIN and invented toast!