Most ancient noodles reported found

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="5">Most ancient noodles reported found</font></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Arial">July 2</font><font face="Arial"><font size="1">, 2005<br> Courtesy Queen's University<br> and World Science staff<br> </font> <br> </font> <b><font face="Arial" size="2">The latest evidence in a long-running debate over who invented noodles has turned up, archaeologists say—and may point to the Chinese as the winners.<br> <br> The researchers, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, say they discovered a 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles, the oldest ever found, in northwestern China.<br> <br> “Noodles have been a popular staple food in many parts of the world for at least 2,000 years, although it is debatable whether the Chinese, the Italians or the Arabs invented them first,” write Houyan Lu and colleagues in the Oct. 13 issue of the research journal Nature.<br> <br> Lu and colleagues reported that the bowl of beautifully preserved, thin yellow noodles were about half a meter (20 inches) long. They turned up in an overturned sealed bowl under 3 metres of floodplain sediment in Lajia, an archaeological site by the Yellow River. <br> <br> The site harbours a settlement that was probably destroyed 4,000 years ago by a major earthquake and flood. <br> <br> To identify the plants the noodles were made from, the team looked at the shape and patterning of starch grains and seed-husk 'phytoliths'—fossilized plant minerals—in the bowl containing the noodles, and compared them with modern crops. <br> <br> They concluded that the noodles had been prepared using grains from millet grass. This is different from modern noodles, which are made with wheat flour. <br> <br> But apart from that, the ancient noodles were produced in just the same way as noodles today: the grains were ground into flour that was used to make dough, which was then pulled and stretched into shape before boiling, the researchers said.<br> <br> “They resemble the La-Mian noodle, a traditional Chinese noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand,” they wrote.</font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2">* * *</font> </p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051014_noodlesfrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font> </p> <p>  </p> </b> </center> </td> </tr> </table> </body>