Silk and Silkworm: (Re)discussion on the Origin and Early History of Using Silk Fibres
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discussions on the origin of silk utilisation usually focus on the origin of discovering filaments, ignoring the existence and availability of short fibres. Among these studies, some arguments with evidence of silkworms have inserted a preconception that silkworm rearing is certainly related to silk utilisation, ignoring the possibility that human ancestors might have reared silkworms for other reasons before they knew how to use silk fibres. Considering the difficulties in obtaining raw materials, the complexity of the production processes, and archaeological evidence for the early use of silk, it seems probable that silk was utilised first in the form of short fibres and these fibres were processed with the spinning technique. By analysing the relationship between silk reeling and weaving, silk reeling was invented to answer the growing demands of the weaving industry. By analysing the relationship between silk utilisation and silkworm rearing, silkworm domestication was motivated and prompted by the growing demand from silk reeling workshops. Silk reeling appeared after the birth of weaving and before the activity of rearing silkworms. Combined with the scientific study results of the silkworm taming and domestication time, silk fibres were discovered and used before 7000 BP.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".