World's oldest noodles found in China

[snailpoo]

LONDON - Italians are known for them and theories suggest they may have originated in the 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 ancient noodles preserved in an overturned, sealed bowl at an archaeological site near the Yellow River in northwestern China.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9671263/


Now the only question is... what soup?

[hooligan]

Must taste like snails ... or poo.

[Banana]

I wonder if they're still edible.

[TB4000]

World's Oldest Noodles Alter View of Ancient Diet

Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.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 bowl.


The bowl was buried beneath 10 feet of sediment in Lajia, a small community located by the Yellow River in northwestern China that was destroyed by an earthquake about 4,000 years ago.

The thin, yellow noodles were about 20 inches long and resembled La-Mian, 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 year old book written during the East Han Dynasty in China, said Lu Houyuan, 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 another surprise: the ancient noodles were not made from wheat like modern noodles, 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 northwestern China 5,000-4,500 years ago, it wasn't commonly cultivated until much later," Huoyuan said in an email interview.

"It took a long time for wheat to become successfully naturalized in China," Houyuan told LiveScience. "It gradually spread from northwestern China to the East and to the South."

It was only much later, during the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, from 618 to 1279 AD, that wheat began to catch on with people in China, finally becoming the second largest staple grain crop in the country after rice.

[snailpoo]

http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?t=26556

[hkRT]

I thought this thread is about noodles...

It's amazing how those 4000 year old noodles got so well-preserved!

[fresh22]

I hope nobody accidentally eats the noodles, if they did they could be headed for some serious gastrointestinal discomfort.

[SunWuKong]

i'm still wondering how they saw that and decided they should test to see if it was noodles.

[robotic]

i wonder about the history and fate of this noodle in a bowl ^_^ woah.

[ahsingjai]

4,000-Year-Old Noodle Dish Found in China

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051013/ap_on_fe_st/china_old_noodles;_ylt=ApQwEUOe72A6blrwiidlRIus0NU E;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MzV0MTdmBHNlYwM3NTM-

By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press WriterThu Oct 13, 1:51 PM ET

And you thought your leftovers were old. A 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles has been discovered at an archaeological site in western China — possible proof for the argument that China invented pasta before Italy.


"These are definitely the earliest noodles ever found," said Lu Houyuan, a researcher with the Institute of Geology in Beijing who studied the ingredients of the pristinely preserved pasta.


The discovery of the delicate yellow noodles in Minhe County in the province of Qinghai is reported in this week's edition of Nature magazine.


"Chinese people say Marco Polo brought noodles from China back to Italy and Italians say they had noodles before that," Lu said. "All this has been based on documentary material, on personal accounts and menus. But we've been unable to find any actual material — until now."


The fist-size clump of noodles was found inside an overturned bowl under 10 feet of sediment from a flood that researchers suspect wiped out the Qijia Culture of the late Neolithic era.


When researchers lifted up the bowl, they discovered the 20-inch noodles sitting atop an inverted cone of clay that had sealed the bowl, it said.
The noodles were made from a dough of two local varieties of millet — broomcorn and foxtail millet — rather than the more common wheat or rice. The dough was pulled into long strands before being boiled.


Rice noodles are popular in southern China while northerners rely mostly on wheat to make their noodles, dumplings and bread.


The excavation site area is located is now populated mainly by China's Muslim ethnic Hui minority. The region's poorer farmers reportedly still eat millet noodles, said contributing researcher Ye Maoling, though he has yet to try them for himself.


Lu and Ye say they plan to try making millet noodles like those found at the archaeological site themselves.

[SunWuKong]

threads merged.

[Player 0]

Do any of you remember the point of this debate, or the one that's going on right now which is ridiculously off topic.

[SunWuKong]

Originally Posted by Player 0

Do any of you remember the point of this debate, or the one that's going on right now which is ridiculously off topic.

good point. the thread has been split off:
http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?t=26595

[juice4]

Professor Houyuan Lu said: “Prior to the discovery of noodles at Lajia, the earliest written record of noodles is traced to a book written during the East Han Dynasty sometime between AD 25 and 220, although it remained a subject of debate whether the Chinese, the Italians, or the Arabs invented it first.” “Our discovery indicates that noodles were first produced in China,” the researcher from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, explained to BBC News. Of course, everything is MADE IN CHINA!

http://www.kineda.com/?p=746&sid=f03...f8dc71bb7c2f26

It's official: China invented noodles

Thu, 13 Oct 2005
A decades-long wrangle as to which culture gave birth to the noodle has finally been settled — and the winner is China.

Italians, through the explorer Marco Polo, and Arabs had been the other claimants to a culinary staple that has been around for at least 2000 years.

But a team of archaeologists, reporting in the British journal Nature, say there is now incontrovertible proof that China was faster to the pasta.

They discovered 4000-year-old long, boiled strands of noodles protected by an upside-down bowl, embedded in a fine, brownish-yellow clay on a terrace of the Yellow River at Lajia, northwestern China.

The site, on a floodplain whose sediments are three metres (10 feet) thick, has been under careful excavation since 1999. The age of the find comes from carbon dating of the sediments in its lay.

The Neolithic noodles show no trace of the durum wheat, bread wheat or barley that usually make up today's pasta.

Instead, they are made from millet, one of the first grass plants to be farmed in the semi-arid plateau of northwestern China.

"The noodles were thin (about 0.3cm, 0.12 inch in diameter), delicate, more than 50cm (two feet) in length and yellow in colour," say the delighted researchers, led by Lu Houyuan of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

"They resemble the La-Mian noodle, a traditional Chinese noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand."

The tale of the noodle-slurping pioneers has a tragic ending, though.

The village of Lajia was soon wiped out by a huge earthquake and catastrophic flooding, the archaeologists say.

AFP

[SunWuKong]

threads have been merged.