The culture is most famous for its pottery, but it was also known for producing small amounts of silk and hemp weavings.

“At present, many silkworm cocoons and chrysalises discovered in Yuncheng City have been found in good condition, indicating that the ancestors of Yangshao Culture in southern Shanxi had raised silkworms,” Tian Jianwen, a researcher at the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, told Xinhua.

In 2020, scientists announced they found a slightly older stone chrysalis, about 6,000 years old, at a nearby site in Shanxi. That stone carving helped scientists feel more confident that the Yangshao people had already grasped silkworm cultivation by that moment in history.

The most important discovery from the early days of silk was made in 1926 by Li Ji, often regarded as the founding father of Chinese archaeology. He found half of a cocoon from the Yangshao culture that experts believe was cut in half by ancient people to observe the silkworm’s metamorphosis.

Other examples of ancient artwork dedicated to silkworms have been found throughout ancient history, according to The Evolution of Textiles along the Silk Road, a book by Zhao Feng, the curator of the China National Silk Museum.

They include carved ivory from between 4,000 and 5,000BC, a pottery shard from 3,000-2,500BC painted with the image of a silkworm and carvings from the Liangzhu culture (3300–2300BC) made from jade.

“From the number of very early renderings of silkworms and their life cycle, we may speculate that such a sequence of metamorphoses, with its alternations between stillness and motion, reminded the early Chinese vividly of the human life cycle,” Zhao wrote.

According to Victoria Finlay, author of Fabric: the Hidden History of the Material World, we start to see evidence of workshops designed to create silk from silkworms emerging around the Yellow River about 5,000 years ago.

She also pointed to what is called “the earliest known dyed textile in the world”, which is a silk tabby fragment that was used to wrap around a dead child.

“It is hard as a historian to make a wide statement from one single find, but it does suggest that silk was precious if you were to wrap a beloved child in it. And also, perhaps that it had a sacred role of some kind, a role (which it still has today in Buddhist temples) in ritual and gift giving,” Finlay said.

Manufacturers harvest from silkworms, officially named Bombyx mori, before they complete their metamorphosis into a moth because when the animal turns into a moth it secrets an enzyme to break free, ruining much of the silk.

While China was developing silk thousands of years ago, it was likely unknown by Western civilisations for a long time.

Zhao wrote: “Because of great distances and poor communications, ancient Europeans knew Chinese silk only by hearsay.”

Silk manufacturing would eventually become so crucial to China’s economy that emperors for thousands of years instituted a death penalty for people who had been discovered to have smuggled out silkworms or trade secrets.

Silkworms eventually found their way to the Byzantine empire in 552AD, with legend saying they were smuggled out of China by two monks preaching in the country, but that theory has never been proven definitively.

That did not portend the end of China’s dominance in silk production, as Chinese silk was still highly sought after for centuries because it was of better quality.