TECHNOLOGY

The Origin of Silk

~4,300 years ago

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian

The silkworm was domesticated in China about 4,300 years ago, the only invertebrate fully domesticated in antiquity, for the continuous filament of its cocoon.

Sericulture is the rearing of the silkworm, Bombyx mori, derived from the wild species Bombyx mandarina, for the unwinding of its cocoon, which yields a continuous filament several hundred metres long. The species constitutes the only fully domesticated invertebrate of antiquity, to the point of having lost the ability to fly. Silk textiles are preserved from the third millennium BCE in China, and the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty include the terms designating the worm and the silk. Microscopic examination has moreover identified wild moth silk in contemporary ornaments of the Indus civilisation: the cross-section of a filament presents a shape proper to the species that produced it, triangular in the domesticated worm, flatter and broader in the large wild bombycids.

Why it matters

Silk constitutes one of the most valuable transportable goods of antiquity, at the origin of the name given to the Eurasian trade routes, and its manufacturing process was the object of prolonged protection. The Indian case shows, however, that the unwinding of cocoons was not exclusive to China, the Chinese specificity bearing on the domesticated species and not on the principle.

Dating & uncertainty

Silk textiles have been recovered at Qianshanyang, in Neolithic China, in the second half of the third millennium BCE, sericulture being probably earlier; Shang inscriptions name the worm and the silk in the second millennium. Silk fibres from wild moths, dated to about 2450 to 2000 BCE, have been identified in Indus ornaments.

Our species’ history as one day

23:40:2019 min 39 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day