From an English-speaking competition at Beijing in 2005, a contestant claimed that spaghetti came from China.
The contestant said that Marco Polo lived in China for 20 years. He learned making noodles there and then brought the knowledge back to Europe.
Is that true?
This is a story that is passed around, but it is most likely false. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia article on pasta's history.
This news article gives some more angles on why it's most likely not true but also notes that pasta might have been invented in China. In my opinion, pasta is not that hard to invent.
Unfortunately I cannot give you a precise reference, but once I read an article on the history of pasta and spaghetti. It was on Le Journal du CNRS, which is the official monthly magazine of the same institution, the French scientific research national council.
The authors of the article traced the origin of spaghetti pasta, or at least its first documented occurrences (I have forgot if they were remnants or pictorial evidences) in Persia. Towards west, pasta moved along the routes of maritime traffics, and production of pasta is documented in Cyprus. From there, genoese fleet and merchants brought it to Genoa and the regions nowadays known as Riviera Ligure di Ponente and Côte Azur (the latter is nowadays France). Imperia, a genoese town near the border with France, became the main centre for pasta production, a fact which, though recent troubles, persisted until current days. Pasta production spread then to rest of Italy.
Pasta was made and preserved in Europe well prior of Marco Polo.
According to Culinary archaeology: Millet noodles in Late Neolithic China Nature 437, 967-968 (13 October 2005), basically, yes, noodles from "Lajia archaeological site (35° 49' 40" N, 102° 51' 15" E) is located on a terrace on the upper reaches of the Yellow River in northwestern China" have been carbon dated as being 4000 years old.
There is a photograph of the 4000 year old noodles in the article, with the caption:
Noodles dating to 4,000 years ago, shown here on top of an in-filled sediment cone and revealed after the inverted earthenware bowl containing them was removed. Scale bar, 1 cm
The article adds:
Unlike modern Italian pasta and Asian noodles, which are generally made from durum wheat (tetraploid) and bread wheat (hexaploid), respectively, the prehistoric noodles show no evidence that wheat, barley or other non-grass plants were used to supply their ingredients. Our findings support the belief that early plant domestication and food production relied on millet crops10, 11, 12 in the semi-arid Loess Plateau region of China.
Overall, there is good evidence that the oldest elongated noodles are from China, but noodles were already know in Europe before Marco Polo.
