A recent scientific report appeared to reassure the world that not everyone in China is dwelling on that country's muscle-flexing space program or the intractability of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Some Chinese, it suggested, are focused on less tendentious things. Take archaeologists, the subject of the report in the Oct. 13 issue of Nature magazine. Apparently, a team of them discovered a bowl of old noodles at a site in western China, and they are quite excited about it.
As who wouldn't be? Because when they said old noodles, they didn't mean last week's takeout leftovers. They meant 4,000-year-old, pale yellow strands of identifiable millet pasta, still in their overturned dish and pristinely preserved under three meters of sediment. (To be fair to the Neolithic noodles, though, they were evidently in no worse shape than last week's leftovers. We're guessing that would be fairly al dente.)
We know what you're thinking: How pleasant to read a story focused solely on an unexpected archaeological find. This was just about a bowl of noodles, right? A nice news morsel for newspapers' food coverage, with no spin, no agenda, no competition involved?