A 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles unearthed in China is the earliest example ever found of one of the world's most popular foods, scientists reported today. It also suggests an Asian—not Italian—origin for the staple dish.

The beautifully preserved, long, thin yellow noodles were found inside an overturned sealed bowl at the Lajia archaeological site in northwestern China. The bowl was buried under ten feet (three meters) of sediment.

"This is the earliest empirical evidence of noodles ever found," Houyuan Lu of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences said in an e-mail interview.

Lu and colleagues report the find tomorrow in the science journal Nature.

The scientists determined the noodles were made from two kinds