Italy and Arabia, take note: 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles found in China

GA S T R O - A R C H A E O LO GY

A bowl of Neolithic noodles has revealed China was the most likely birthplace of this popular food. For millennia, arguments have raged about whether the noodle was invented by the Chinese, Italians or Arabs. Now a sealed earthenware bowl of thin yellow noodles about 4,000 years old has been found by Dr. Houyuan Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with colleagues in Beijing and Louisiana. “This is the earliest empirical evidence of noodles ever found,” said Dr. Lu, who describes the findings in the journal

Nature. The 50-centimetrelong noodles, made from millet, were found inside an overturned bowl under flood-plain sediment in Lajia, northwestern China.