World's Oldest Noodles

A 4,000–year–old bowl of noodles (above), the earliest example ever found, has been unearthed at the Lajia archaelogical site near the Yellow River in northwestern China.

The beautifully preserved noodles were discovered in an overturned, sealed bowl buried under ten feet of sediment.

Radiocarbon dating was used to determine their age.

Houyuan Lu of Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences said, in an email interview, "This is the earliest empirical evidence of noodles ever found."

The noodles were made from two kinds of millet, a grain indigenous to China and widely cultivated there 7,000 years ago.

Until this discovery, the oldest account of the existence of noodles was in a 1,900–year–old book written during the East Han Dynasty in China.