news.yahoo.com/s/space/20051012/sc_space/worldsoldestnoodlesalterviewofancientdiet
com Wed Oct 12, 2:00 PM ET Archeologists excavating an ancient Chinese settlement discovered a small pile of well-preserved noodles after turning over an upside-down clay b owl.
click here The bowl was buried beneath 10 feet of sediment in Lajia, a small communi ty located by the Yellow River in northwestern China that was destroyed by an earthquake about 4,000 years ago.
thin, yellow noodles were about 20 inches long and resembled La-M ian, a type of traditional Chinese noodle made by grinding wheat to make dough and then repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand. The finding is reported in the October 13 issue of the journal Nature. Prior to the discovery, the earliest mention of noodles was in a 1,900 ye ar old book written during the East Han Dynasty in China, said Lu Houyua n, an archeologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who was involved in the discovery. When the archeologists examined the starch grains and microscopic mineral particles that form in plants called "phytoliths," they received anothe r surprise: the ancient noodles were not made from wheat like modern noo dles, but from millet, a type of grain that, along with rice, formed the foundation of agriculture in ancient China. "Archaeological evidence suggests that even though wheat was present in n orthwestern China 5,000-4,500 years ago, it wasn't commonly cultivated u ntil much later," Huoyuan said in an email interview. "It took a long time for wheat to become successfully naturalized in Chin a," Houyuan told LiveScience. "It gradually spread from northwestern Chi na to the East and to the South." It was only much later, during the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, fro m 618 to 1279 AD, that wheat began to catch on with people in China, fin ally becoming the second largest staple grain crop in the country after rice.
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An undated handout photograph, released October 12, 2005, shows noodl es dating back 4,000 years on top of an in-filled sediment cone. Italian s are known for them and theories suggest they may have originated in th e Middle East but scientists said on Wednesday the world's oldest known noodles, dating back 4,000 years, were made in China. Houyuan Lu, of the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing and his colleagues found the anci ent noodles preserved in an overturned, sealed bowl at an archaeological site near the Yellow River in northwestern China.
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