Jōmon period
The name "cord-marked" was first applied by the American zoologist and orientalist Edward S. Morse, who discovered sherds of pottery in 1877 and subsequently translated "straw-rope pattern" into Japanese as Jōmon.
[4] The pottery style characteristic of the first phases of Jōmon culture was decorated by impressing cords into the surface of wet clay and is generally accepted to be among the oldest in the world.
[5] The Jōmon period was rich in tools and jewelry made from bone, stone, shell and antler; pottery figurines and vessels; and lacquerware.
[10][11][12][13] The approximately 14,000-year Jōmon period is conventionally divided into several phases, progressively shorter: Incipient (13,750–8,500 BC), Initial (8,500–5,000), Early (5,000–3,520), Middle (3,520–2,470), Late (2,470–1,250), and Final (1,250–500).
These types continued to develop, with increasingly elaborate patterns of decoration, undulating rims, and flat bottoms so that they could stand on a surface.
[24] It seems that food sources were so abundant in the natural environment of the Japanese islands that they could support fairly large, semi-sedentary populations.
[24] As the glaciers melted following the end of the last glacial period (approximately 12,000 BC), sea levels rose, separating the Japanese archipelago from the Asian mainland; the closest point (in Kyushu) about 190 km (120 mi) from the Korean Peninsula is near enough to be intermittently influenced by continental developments, but far enough removed for the peoples of the Japanese islands to develop independently.
In the northeast, the plentiful marine life carried south by the Oyashio Current, especially salmon, was another major food source.
Settlements along both the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean subsisted on immense amounts of shellfish, leaving distinctive middens (mounds of discarded shells and other refuse) that are now prized sources of information for archaeologists.
Supported by the highly productive deciduous forests and an abundance of seafood, the population was concentrated in Honshu and Kyushu, but Jōmon sites range from Hokkaido to the Ryukyu Islands.
[38] There is evidence to suggest that arboriculture was practiced in the form of tending groves of lacquer (Toxicodendron verniciflua) and nut (Castanea crenata and Aesculus turbinata) producing trees,[41][42] as well as soybean, bottle gourd, hemp, Perilla, adzuki, among others.
During this time Magatama stone beads make a transition from being a common jewelry item found in homes into serving as a grave good.
[14] This period saw a rise in complexity in the design of pit-houses, the most commonly used method of housing at the time,[citation needed] with some even having paved stone floors.
The Japanese chestnut, Castanea crenata, becomes essential, not only as a nut bearing tree, but also because it was extremely durable in wet conditions and became the most used timber for building houses during the Late Jōmon phase.
Outside Hokkaido, the Final Jōmon is succeeded by a new farming culture, the Yayoi (c. 300 BC – AD 300), named after an archaeological site near Tokyo.
That version of Japanese history, however, comes from the country's first written records, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, dating from the 6th to the 8th centuries, after Japan had adopted Chinese characters (Go-on/Kan-on).
[51] Some elements of modern Japanese culture may date from the period and reflect the influences of a mingled migration from the northern Asian continent and the southern Pacific areas and the local Jōmon peoples.
Among those elements are the precursors to Shinto, marriage customs, architectural styles, and technological developments such as lacquerware, laminated bows called "yumi", and metalworking.
They further concluded that the "dual structure theory" regarding the population history of Japan must be revised and that the Jōmon people had more diversity than originally suggested.
[64] A 2015 study found specific gene alleles, related to facial structure and features among some Ainu individuals, which largely descended from local Hokkaido Jōmon groups.
The lineages K and F are suggested to have been presented during the early Jōmon period but got replaced by C and D. The analysis of a Jōmon sample (Ikawazu shell-mound, Tahara, Japan) and an ancient sample from the Tibetan Plateau (Chokhopani, China) found only partially shared ancestry, pointing towards a "positive genetic bottleneck" regarding the spread of haplogroup D from ancient "East Asian Highlanders" (related to modern day Tujia people, Yao people, and Tibetans, as well as Tripuri people).
Japonic-speakers then expanded during the Yayoi period, assimilating the newcomers, adopting rice-agriculture, and fusing mainland Asian technologies with local traditions.
