AS 201 Japan's Prehistory

The Jomon Period c. 12,000 BCE-300 BCE

What was so amazing about the Jomon culture?

#1. One thing amazing about the Jomon culture is how long the Jomon way of life lasted … over 13,000 thousand years as well as the early date of the beginning of the period.

#2. The Jomon people are thought to have produced the oldest surviving examples of pottery in the world.

#3. Jomon people achieved sedentism which means they settled down in one place to live as early as 9,000 years ago and maintained a high level of craft production…all very unusual for hunter-gatherers in early postglacial times.

#4. Archaeologists think the Jomon hunting-gathering culture was unusual because although it was a stone age culture (historians call prehistoric people who used stone tools a Mesolithic culture), it also had some highly complex characteristics of Neolithic cultures which usually refer to people who:

--made many clay vessels,

--had an organized and sophisticated lifestyle of collecting and foraging for food and practiced a simple kind of agriculture by cultivating a small number of plants.

 

There have been lots of questions about to what degree modern Japanese might be related to the Jomon people. While it has long been held that the Jomon peole were likely ancestors to the modern day Ainu but their relationship relationship to the rest of Japanese was tangential at best, recent DNA evidence seems to suggest that Jomon people did, indeed, become part of the ethnic mix of modern Japanese people. See

http://www.pitt.edu/~annj/courses/notes/jomon_genes.html

 

It is argued here that the genetic markers tell a story of an initial Yayoi migration into central Japan and a subsequent spread of the people toward the north and south. Since both Y chromosome markers are still found in varying degrees throughout Japan, it appears that the genes of the Jomon and Yayoi peoples did intermingle significantly.

"Our data support the hybridization theory," says Michael F. Hammer who examined the Y chromosomes of people throughout Asia. As reported in the American Journal of Genetic Studies, this research suggest that Japan's original inhabitants, the Jomon, mixed with a later culture, the Yayoi. Hammer and his colleagues are also studying a second Y chromosome marker that may serve as a sign of the Yayoi migration. This marker is common in Koreans and appears most frequently in the central islands of Japan, says Hammer. This would support the notion that during the late Yayoi and the following Tomb Culture Era, there was significant in migration from the Korean Peninsula of people in the western and central part of the Japanese islands.

Together, contends Hammer. the two markers tell a story of an initial Yayoi migration into central Japan and a subsequent spread of the people toward the north and south. Since both Y chromosome markers are still found in varying degrees throughout Japan, it appears that the genes of the Jomon and Yayoi peoples did intermingle significantly.

The research on YAP has also addressed another controversial question: Where did the Jomon come from? Some researchers have long held the idea that the Jomon originated in southeast Asia and spread to Japan about 12,000 years ago. Analyses of dental remains, shared aspects of language, and even some genetic studies have offered support for this scenario. Interesting stuff. See the link above for more information.

 

 

 

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