[blam]

"Since silk wasn't the only valuable item carried on the Silk Road, and China itself suffered an incontrovertible Dark Age at the time, we'll just ignore that. A recent newsbrief in Science News indicated that European silkworms are actually descended from an entirely different insect than those used in China anyway."

Yup. I believe I posted that article on FR but, I can't locate it. Maybe our expert SunkenCiv can.

[muawiyah]

The silkworm thing? It's not too long ago that the story came out. I recognized immediately that it disproved the old "stolen silkworm" stories.

Intriguingly the ancient people who set up trading posts in the Japanese islands to which the natives brought silkworm bolls (circa 100BC to 300BC) appear to have been the same people who are buried in their tartans along the Silk Road in West Central China.

So maybe the silkworm business went both ways up and down that road (as far as the technology was concerned), with local insects of various species doing the hardpart.

[blam]

See my post #25. Can you find that article?

[SunkenCiv]

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