Some leftovers are more significant than others. While you and I might have some old food lurking in the back of the fridge,

the truly ancient stuff is in the hands of archaeologists.

Back in March, a great example came to light.

Researchers working in a dig site in Turkey known as Chatel Hoiac

recently announced that they had uncovered something truly amazing.

It's a loaf of bread, small, unbaked, and fermented, and it's nearly 9,000 years old.

Bread is, of course, one of a few relatively unchanged threads that run through human history.

You and I can pick up a piece of sour dough at lunch today, smell it, pull it apart, and taste

it, and make a visceral connection to people who lived a long long time ago.

That alone is magical.

But bread is also a signal that a community of people 9,000 years ago in Turkey, had enough grain to bake on a regular basis, which means

that they grew cultivated crops rather than harvesting in the wild, and crops meant settling down in one place rather than following wildlife across the land and seasonal movements.

In other words, bread means civilization.

It's a list of ingredients that hint at an amazing story. They just need to be put together

by historians and given enough time to develop. Thankfully, that's a skill that humans are very, very good at. And it's one that we can apply to

folklore too. Every community has a story to tell. The ingredients are right

there buried in legends, documents documents and the family trees of those who came before us.

On their own they are interesting, sometimes even delightful, but when we take the time to combine them into one pot and give it a stir, what takes place is truly powerful.

It creates tales that are interesting or educational, even entertaining, and more often than not, some of those stories are

downright terrifying. I'm Aaron Mankey and this is lore. The first thing we need is a setting, a place of beauty and drama and maybe a touch of tragedy.

And if there's one land with all of that in abundance, it's Ireland. Now the Emerald Isle is a big

place with lots of unique communities and amazing stories to go along with them.

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