Having a hot bowl of noodles in Beijing is a good thing, and an old thing, too. Noodles have been a staple of Chinese cuisine for a long time, with the earliest written record dating from 25 - 220 AD during the Han dynasty. But that's nothing. Archaeologists at the Lajia dig site in northwestern China uncovered a sealed bowl containing long, thin, well preserved, yellow noodles. At about 4,000 years old, they were made from two types of ground millet grain, which was more prevalent at the time than wheat. Now that's an old noodle.

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