Hungry? Have Some Noodles… (ca. 2000 BC)
While it is often taken for granted that Italy holds the title of Pasta Inventor, a discovery of the world’s oldest noodles has turned this belief on its head. Underneath 10 feet of sediment, at a small archaeological site near the Yellow River in northwestern China, the dried remains of thin, yellow noodles about 50cm long were found inside of a clay pot.
It seems that the noodles were inside of someone’s bowl for dinner, when a sudden catastrophe caused the settlement’s inhabitants to try and flee the area. This theory comes from the discovery of a number of skeletons at the site that were strewn about in various positions as though the people were attempting to escape the area.
The most likely explanation is a catastrophic earthquake that caused severe flooding from the river – enveloping the settlement and in the process, inverting someone’s bowl of noodles. This unique and unlikely combination of factors caused a vacuum space between the ground soil and the bottom of the bowl, preserving the noodles from decomposition!
The noodles are very similar in appearance to La-Mian noodles, a traditional Chinese dish made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the noodle dough by hand. It is a very labor-intensive process, suggesting that the community that made these ancient noodles already had a well-established sense of cuisine and cooking practices. Scientific analysis of the noodles revealed that they were made from millet grains, unlike modern noodles that are made using wheat flour.
Prior to the discovery, the earliest known record of noodles comes from a book written during the East Han Dynasty in China, dating somewhere between 25 and 220 AD – however, there has always been some debate as to whether the Chinese, Arabs or Italians invented the food first. With the discovery of these noodles, all signs point to China as the first noodle production powerhouse.
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Tomorrow: Coatless Neanderthals
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