A dish filled with beautifully preserved yellow noodles from 4,000 years ago has been unearthed at a dig near the Yellow River in northwestern China, settling a long-running dispute about who invented it.

The noodles from the Lajia archaeological site, which are about 50cm (20in) long and 3mm in diameter, appear similar in style to a traditional variety called La-Mian, which are still popular in China.

Like La-Mian noodles, they appear to have been made by stretching dough by hand, though the ancient dough was made from millet flour and not the wheat, barley or rice that are used today.

The find, details of which are published today in the journal Nature, proves that the Chinese were shaping flour into noodles and boiling them for the plate at least 2,000 years before the practice first emerged in Italy.

The origins of Italian pasta remain uncertain, with various theories attributing the first recipes to the Etruscans, Romans and Arab traders.

An Etruscan tomb from the fourth century BC, just north of Rome, has a mural showing servants mixing flour with water, along with a rolling pin and shape cutters. The Etruscans and Romans, however, are generally thought to have baked rather than boiled dough shapes, which would have had more in common with pizza than pasta.

Boiled pasta is more likely to have reached Italy from the Arab world between the 5th and 8th centuries. The popular belief that it was brought back from China by Marco Polo, however, is a myth: a document from 1279 shows that Genoese soldiers carried pasta among their provisions, 16 years before the explorer returned from the Orient.

The ancient Chinese noodles were found during a dig at the Lajia site which holds the remains of a Stone Age settlement. The village appears to have been destroyed by an earthquake and floods about 4,000 years ago and is now buried beneath a layer of sediment 3m (10ft) thick.

A research team led by Houyuan Li, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, discovered a sealed earthenware bowl embedded upside down in clay which, when opened, turned out to be full of noodles.

“When we lifted off the bowl, the remains of the noodles were found inside,” Dr Li said. “The noodles were thin — about 3mm in diameter — delicate, more than 50cm in length and yellow in colour. They resemble the La-Mian noodle, a traditional Chinese noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough.”

To identify the plants from which the noodle flour was made, the team compared the starch grains in the bowl containing the noodles with modern crops.

This revealed that the pasta was made from millet grass. “Unlike modern Italian pasta and Asian noodles, which are generally made from durum wheat and bread wheat respectively, the prehistoric noodles show no evidence that wheat, barley or other non-grass plants were used to supply their ingredients,” the researchers said.

“Our findings support the belief that early plant domestication and food production relied on millet crops in the semi-arid Loess Plateau region of China.”

MENU MYTHS

Pasta and noodles Originated in China, not Italy

Chicken Tikka Masala Originated in Britain, not India

Pizza Originated in Italy, not the United States

Hamburgers Originated in Germany, not America

Chop Suey Originated in the United States, not China

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