Fermenting in the Collective Unconscious

Yeast are one-cell fungi –Saccharomyces cerevisiae. They’re my sort of creature; they love carbs and warm weather. As they go about their business in the bread dough, they change starch (some of the flour) into sugar, and then ferment the sugar into alcohol and a gas (carbon dioxide.) This gas, along with trapped air, gives the dough air pockets and the bread a porous texture -- for soaking up olive oil and butter, of course.
Did a multi-tasking, Egyptian baker walk off and forget about his flatbread dough, leaving it to the unsettling influences of air-borne yeast cells? Or did an apprentice, too lazy to go fetch another bucket of water, decide to make up a batch of bread dough with beer? Food historians like Reay Tannahill in Food in History enjoy imagining such scenerios, but no one knows how the yeast finally got into the dough. Since brewers and bakers often worked side-by-side, either story could be true.
The lazy apprentice story, however, has more dramatic potential. It’s about a person, faced with a problem. He makes a decision and takes a risk. For the yeast to do its thing, flour from unparched wheat (i.e., rare and expensive) would have to be used for the dough. That raises the stakes for our hero. And beer-leavened bread would have a more dramatic climax than the weak reaction we’d expect from an early sourdough prototype.
I think I’ll name him . . . “Joe.” He’s a 12-year-old . . . slave . . . a bright smart-aleck who dreams of bigger things . . . Excuse me, I’ve got to go make some notes.