In this first episode, we will look at an overview of Japan during the Paleolithic period.  We'll start with a look at the geological formation of the islands, and then talk about the first people who came over, starting about 40,000 years ago.  We'll go into what we know about them and discuss a little bit of what life must have been like for them.  This will take us most of the way through the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, period, right up to the period when the temperatures were just starting to rise.

For more go to: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-1

Rough Transcript

(Auto-transcription thanks to listener Zach)

 Greetings, my name is Joshua, and welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. This episode we're covering Japan from prehistoric times up to the end of the Pleistocene, more commonly known as the Ice Age, which will bring us out just before the Jomon Period. I have to warn you, we're going to go through this pretty quickly, as we have a lot of ground to cover and not much to go on. Still, I think it helps us to start here, and really set the stage on which all our actors will play their parts. And to set some expectations, don't expect to be jumping into much of the real story yet. This is mostly background material, and I'd understand if you want to skip on to the next episode. That said, it is nonetheless an important piece in understanding the whole history of Japan. So to that end, we'll start with the basic geography of the archipelago, hitting on some of the points that make up the physical location that is Japan. Then we'll look at what the islands were like when people first arrived. We'll talk about who these people were, what life might have looked like for them, given our sparse archaeological evidence anyway. All right, so to start with, let's make sure we have a handle on the geography of the islands of Japan.

 

Strung out like pearls along the far eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, there are some 6,000 islands that make up the Japanese archipelago. This includes the islands around Sakhalin in the north, down to the islands of Okinawa in the south, and continuing on down to modern-day Taiwan. While most of these are relatively small, towards the northern end of the chain are four larger islands, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido. Now, for our purposes here, we will be mostly talking about the first three islands I mentioned, Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku. However, as we look at this earlier period, we'll also be looking at the chain of islands down to Okinawa, as there are quite a few similarities through this early period, before there is anything really resembling a state on the islands, at least as we would understand it today. Now, this may be a good time for you to grab a map if you aren't already familiar with the geography of Japan. I'll put one up with this podcast, so just find the episode page at SengokuDaimyo.com. Or grab your own. Go ahead and pause the podcast. I'll wait.

 

Ready?

 

All right. So if you look at most maps of Japan, the large island at the very top is Hokkaido. As I mentioned, it wasn't truly considered a part of "Japan" for most of the history we'll be discussing. The indigenous people up there are known today as Ainu, and they have their own customs and language, though there are plenty of similarities with their southern neighbors as well. Just south of Hokkaido is the island of Honshu, which curves to the southwest. This is where the modern cities of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and others can be found. This is where most of the historic capitals were situated, including the imperial court. For much of Japanese history, if you wanted to wield political influence, you would need to spend some time in these areas. Of course, in the time we are discussing now, there was no polity to wield influence over, but we'll still take a look at what was there and what we know of what life was like.

 

Just to the south of Honshu, southwest of modern-day Osaka, is the island of Shikoku. This is the smallest of the main islands, but still large enough to hold several domains over the centuries. In fact, the name Shikoku literally means "four states" or "provinces". It would later be the home of the Tosa domain, modern Kochi prefecture, which was very active in the late Edo period, and its series of temples are still a major pilgrimage for some Japanese Buddhists.

 

The last of the large islands is Kyushu. This island sits closest to the continent and to the Okinawan island chain, which then goes all the way down to modern Taiwan. For many years, Kyushu was the natural entry point for anyone coming to Japan from the Asian mainland. Hakata Bay was the site of both the attempted Mongol invasions and the location from which most missions to the mainland departed. It was important enough to have its own arm of the imperial government, the Dazaifu, even though it often suffered from neglect.

 

Now, millions of years ago, all of these islands, what would become the Japanese archipelago, were part of the greater Eurasian landmass. But as the plates shifted and the archipelago drifted east, new mountains rose up from the ocean floor, and water filled in the low-lying areas in between. Through this whole process were created the Japanese islands and the Japan Sea. It's this sea that has probably most shaped the character of Japan, as it formed a moat and Japan's primary defense against the turmoil of the Asian mainland.

 

Now to really get a good idea of what the Japan Sea means for the islands, it may be helpful to use the British Isles for contrast. So from the Cliffs of Dover, one can see the European continent, and vice versa, at least on a clear day. This has led to more or less constant contact between Great Britain and Europe, as it wasn't too difficult a leap for some with a ship to sail out across the channel. After all, they know there's something on the other side, they can see it. This kept those living in the British Isles in regular contact with the rest of Europe, as can be seen by their involvement in the politics, wars, and culture of the continent. Of course it also put them at regular threat of invasion, whether from the Romans, the Angles, the Saxons, the Vikings, etc.

 

Now from Northern Kyushu on the other hand, it is roughly 180 kilometers to the Korean peninsula, and the crossing can be quite treacherous without modern navigational aids. Much like the east coast of North America, hurricanes or typhoons regularly migrate up the coast from the equatorial latitudes. Without modern communication and sensing equipment, these storms could come up quickly and without warning. This is precisely what would decimate the Mongol invasion fleets when they were taken out by the kamikaze, or divine wind, back in the 13th century.

 

Because of all this, it required serious nautical skills for people to make the trip, and we will see plenty of periods throughout Japanese history where the risks were just not considered worth the gains of traveling back and forth. So there was never quite the same level of contact and communication that the British Isles enjoyed with Europe, and the Japan Sea played a large role in just why that was so.

 

Another important feature of Japan is its place in the Ring of Fire surrounding the Pacific Ocean. The archipelago is very active volcanically, Mount Fuji being one of the most iconic volcanoes of them all. With its often snow-capped conical dome, Mount Fuji has captured the human imagination since the earliest writings. It dominates the territory around it, and can be seen from multiple locations, providing a reliable navigational tool for those in its vicinity. Rising above the Kanto Plain, it has inspired numerous stories and legends over the years, and it is still one of the most well-known symbols of the islands today. Mount Fuji is in fact only the latest reincarnation of several volcanoes that have appeared on or near the same place for hundreds of thousands of years, well before any clear evidence of humans, at least modern humans anyway. The current volcano has been there for 10,000 years or so. Of course, even though it is a volcano, the last recorded eruption was about 300 years ago, back in 1707. That said, it has gone hundreds of years between eruptions in the past, and is therefore still considered an active volcano.

Now, the volcanic activity along the islands also provides another key natural feature, the hot springs, or onsen. Ranging from comfortable natural spas to the deadly poisonous springs of a Jigokudani, or Hell Valley, one can have little doubt that ancient humans would have taken advantage of these naturally warm springs, just as we do today. From the earliest recorded history, we know that people have sought them out as places of natural relaxation and healing. In fact, some of the oldest businesses and continuous operation in the entire world are built around these hot springs. And if you ever get a chance to visit the Hoshi Ryokan up in Ishikawa Prefecture, I highly recommend it.

We'll likely talk about the Jigokudani at some other point, but let's touch on it briefly here. You see, while hot springs can be nice, sometimes you get more than just a touch of rotten egg smell from the sulfur issuing up from the bowels of the earth. Just as early Europeans connected the smell of sulfur, also known as brimstone, with devilish activity, many Japanese also assumed that these vents were portals to the underworld. In some of the mountainous valleys, heavy poisonous gases will well up from below, but then sit in the small depressions, and these gases can prove to be quite hostile to any and all life, creating steamy, desolate landscapes. It's no wonder that people connected them to the idea of death in the underworld.

Of course, the other aspect of being situated around the Pacific Rim, as they are, is that earthquakes are extremely common. Much like California on the other side of the Pacific, Japan is regularly struck by earthquakes, and this had an influence on their architecture. Earthquakes actually study the construction of ancient Japanese pagodas and have used them to help construct taller and more stable buildings today. Earthquakes don't only happen on land, and being on the edge of the continental shelf without any real barriers means that much of the southern and eastern coasts of Japan are prone to tsunami, which is actually a Japanese term. Traditionally meaning "harbor wave", tsunami have been regular occurrences in Japan since the earliest times. In fact, after the most recent tragedy in Fukushima, it was pointed out that there were old markers that had been set up hundreds of years prior, warning people not to build below a certain point, likely because of a particularly strong tsunami that had hit back then. With all this activity, it is probably not too surprising that Japan is quite mountainous. In fact, about 70% of the land is mountainous terrain, punctuated with small alluvial plains.

It was in these plains that a majority of the people would eventually settle. The plains provided fertile flat land and water and would make for good places to farm once agriculture took off on the islands. Prior to that, they would have allowed easy access as people roamed the islands hunting game as well as access to fresh water and fishing.

Alright, that's a lot about the geography, but what about the people? When did they arrive? What was the environment like at that time? What was life like for them in general?

Well, the earliest firm evidence of human habitation on the island occurs about 40,000 years ago, though there are some sites that could be much earlier. We don't know much about these early modern humans, but we suspect that these earliest societies were hunter-gatherers using stone tools to live off the land. This is often termed the Paleolithic or Old Stone Period, named for those very same stone tools that are the primary evidence of human habitation at the time. This starts with the first evidence of stone tools and lasts until roughly the end of the Pleistocene or Ice Age, a little more than 12,000 years ago.

So a quick note about the term "Ice Age". If your entire idea of the Ice Age comes from certain modern films, you might picture a land perennially covered in ice and snow which lasted for thousands of years, but that's not quite correct. It's understandable if people think this way; the major feature of the Ice Age was certainly the glaciation that happened, and we even refer to it as the “Ice Age”. Even today we can find the evidence of where these glaciers, which are literally rivers of compressed ice, carved out valleys and left behind large moraines, mounds of the earth and detritus that had been carried forward by the glacier and which were deposited when the ice melted and the glaciers receded. Thing about this Ice Age is that there were actually various periods when glaciers were plentiful and then they would recede, but it wasn't as if the entire world was a giant snowball. It wasn't north of the wall for all of our Game of Thrones fans out there. To be honest, if that had happened, we probably wouldn't be here. All the flora and fauna would have died off, at least on land.

It did, however, see periods of much cooler temperatures than we have today, climate change discussions aside. One of these periods reached its zenith about 22,000 years ago, but most of the glaciation appears to have been confined to Europe and the Americas, with only a portion of Asia truly affected. That said, sea levels dropped as much as 120 meters below what they are today, as huge quantities of water were stored in these glaciers and ice sheets in the mountains and polar regions. This could have turned areas of the seafloor into dry land that people and animals could use to cross. This is one of the many reasons why the flora and fauna that we find matches what was living on the rest of the continent. As the sea level fluctuated, Japan was at times either directly connected to the mainland or separated by narrow seas, making it easier to cross, though it is unclear if there were any actual land bridges during the late Pleistocene.

Judging by the depth of the Japan Sea today, it is likely that the water was simply much shallower and the distance much closer. There may have been a connection between the mainland and Hokkaido, but again, between Hokkaido and Honshu, the depths are such that it is unlikely there was ever a complete land bridge between the two islands, even when the sea levels were at their lowest. Still, a narrower, shallower sea provides for safer crossings, and you can easily imagine early people getting into their boats and making it across to this new land. Given that there may or may not have been any fully realized land bridge to the mainland, at least in the last 100,000 years, it is likely that the majority of migrants had to come on some form of boat, even if that is as simple as a raft or some form of canoe.

Of course, being the Ice Age, while the land wasn't covered in ice and snow, temperatures were lower than today, which would have made the winters longer and colder. But that still didn't stop people from spreading out into every corner of the archipelago. This is where we really start to see just how foreign this ancient land was. While most of us who have been there might think of Japan as a place of deer, fox, bears, and even the now extinct Japanese wolf, Paleolithic Japan was a completely different environment. Roaming the hills and plains of the archipelago were animals such as lions, elk, rhinoceros, and several bovid species, ancestors of the modern cow. There were also several species of elephants and mammoths.

Now there have been studies on this topic. Turns out that megafauna, that is large animals, anything larger than a human, well megafauna have a huge impact on the environment. In Africa, for instance, elephants are known to decimate forested areas, turning them into open plains with sparse groves of trees. Combined with the change in climate, the ecology of the islands was much different than what we see today.

So instead of groves of bamboo, maple, and paulownia, imagine a lot more evergreens. A coniferous forest, not too dissimilar from what one might find in the Pacific Northwest areas of the US and Canada. This is the land that the early human inhabitants would have found themselves in.

So in addition to the herds roaming the plains and forests, fish are also quite bountiful, and Japanese fishermen have good access to both the relative shallow waters between Japan and the mainland as well as the deep waters off the continental shelf, which provides myriad varieties of fish and other ocean flora and fauna. Though the lower sea levels may have meant that the Sea of Japan was shallower, the Pacific Ocean still loomed large on the east coast, where the continental shelf drops precipitously downward. That means there is an abundance of opportunities for fishing as well as hunting, even back then.

So this is the land that early humans would have found. A mountainous land, surrounded by water, where lions, elk, and elephants roamed through evergreen forests. The winters were cold, but not unbearable, especially if one had access to a local hot spring. The earth shook on occasion, but for the most part this was not an entirely inhospitable place. But with the stage set, let's really start to look at our players upon it. The first modern humans.

Now I'll freely admit this is not my area of expertise. I'm more accustomed to working with written sources, of which we have none for this period, hence the name, prehistoric. What we do have are stone tools and some skeletal remains. There are of course scholars who spend their entire careers working over the details of different shaped tools and the methods used to create them. But in this case, we just want to get a taste and set the stage for later periods. So I'm going to be generalizing, and I'm not even going to try to get into the specific details of the variations and how the tools were made, what they were made from, etc. Suffice it to say, this is still the Stone Age, and stone tools remain one of our key clues in determining who these people were and when and where they lived. One thing we can see in the archeological record is that these stone tools get more sophisticated as time progresses, but that still only gives us so much information on the people at the time.

Another problem we have? Well, before World War II, most Japanese archeology stopped at the Jomon layer roughly 12,000 years ago, and they didn't bother to dig much deeper. Early archeologists seemed to have felt there was nothing worth finding earlier than the Jomon period, so why bother? It didn't help that early paleolithic finds didn't really fit into the chronology of the imperial histories, and even those things that are found don't have the same kind of obvious cultural attachment found in later periods. After all, if you look at a haniwa figure or Jomon-era cord-marked pot, you see something that is distinctly different from just about anywhere else in the world. A stone axe or hammer, however, unless you're a scholar of such things, can seem quite similar to any other such tool anywhere else in the world. So it's easy to see how it might not have been of interest to early archeologists who were working with a narrative concept of how things had happened.

This attitude changed following World War II, when many of the previously conceived notions were discarded in favor of a more scientific approach to the subject, and the antiquity of the Japanese people became a source of pride for many, inspiring both professional and amateur archeologists alike. That's why, despite the late start in the field, Japanese archeology has more than made up for it, and since the first true Paleolithic excavation at Iwajuku in 1949, there have been over 10,000 sites identified across Japan.

This is helped by the fact that most of the Japanese cities today are built on those same alluvial plains that people have been inhabiting for thousands of years. As new construction has started, it is now common practice to do an exploratory dig to check for archaeological remains.

We also have the benefit that volcanic activity in Japan has laid down consecutive layers of ash over the years. Each eruption has its own signature, based on the composition of the ash from that particular volcano, and the size of Japan means that a single eruption can lay down ash across a large swath of the archipelago. Thus we can look at finds in two different areas and connect them, temporally, through the layers of volcanic ash. This dating is a huge aid in identifying what happened when.

That said, we have to be careful, as there are still reasons why things may be found in an anachronistic setting. And for all of that, there are still artifacts we just won't find, or won't find as many of. Just because we are finding stone tools, doesn't mean that stone was the only medium the early inhabitants of Japan had to work with. Remember, they clearly had some capability to get to the islands, and that wasn't likely floating along in some kind of stone boat. If you think of various cultures even today that make use of those things in the natural environment: bone, wood, leather, grass, etc. Human beings are incredibly innovative, and have long known how to manipulate our environment.

Unfortunately we don't know the specifics unless and until we find some hard evidence, and a lot of this evidence decomposes over time. On top of the stone, we do have a few skeletons from this era, and that gives us even more information. Most of it is fragmentary at best, and found on the outskirts of the archipelago, with a majority of the finds down in the islands of Okinawa. But still, it's something.

So let's take a look at some of the oldest and most complete remains we have from this period, the Minatogawa people. In the late 1960s, businessman and amateur archaeologist Oyama Seiho had made an interesting discovery. He'd purchased limestone building blocks from a quarry in Minatogawa on the island of Okinawa, and noticed what appeared to be bone fragments embedded in the stone. Taking his free time, he started to watch the quarry with interest, checking out to see if anything more was found, and sure enough, two years later, he discovered human remains, and reported the find to Tokyo University professor Suzuki Hisashi.

The bones were confirmed, and over the course of three digs in 1968, 1970, and 1974, Suzuki led a team that excavated the site, uncovering several human skeletons along with other animal remains. They found at least one relatively complete skeleton, and several others. There are several features in these skeletons that bear a strong resemblance to later-period remains from the main island. Furthermore, radiocarbon dating puts the remains at between 19,000 and 16,000 years old, putting them in a relatively small category of remains identified as modern humans in East Asia before the end of the Pleistocene.

Known as the Minatogawa people, based on where they were found, these bones provide some key insights into what people looked like as well as some clues as to their lives. All of the skeletons were found inside a limestone fissure only about a meter wide, which had been filled in with red clay and other debris. The lowest-placed skeleton, known as Minatogawa 1, appears to be male, and he entered the fissure head-first. Other skeletons were found in only fragments, sometimes with quite a bit of distance between these fragments from the same skeleton, and they seem to indicate another four to maybe eight individuals.

So who were these people? How did they die? How did they end up here in this fissure?

Let's start with the one at the bottom, which one would assume to be the oldest and is also the most complete, Minatogawa 1. Picture him in your head, not as a pile of bones, but as a living, breathing person. He's an adult man, about 25 years old, short, 153 cm or about 5 feet tall, which is even shorter than most modern Japanese. His face is lower, wider, longer than most modern Japanese men. He has considerable muscles in his forearms, but not so much with his shoulder and upper arm. In this description, I can't help but think about the character Popeye, though clearly it would have not been that exaggerated. His feet are large, given his height, with strong lower legs. This is someone who runs or walks frequently and for great distances.

He likely is hunting, gathering, and fishing, using relatively simple stone, wood, and bone tools. He lives off the land and has known hunger more than once in his life. He eats what he can get. In good times, this might include the odd boar or deer, bones of which were found in the same area as a skeleton. For the most part, though, he's eating hard, abrasive foods, possibly roots, nuts, or perhaps just food that's partially mixed with sand or stone dust. Regardless of the exact cause, his back molars show considerable wear. It is possible that this wear is also due to other activities, such as using his teeth to help make tools, but the evidence is inconclusive, so we really aren't sure.

Besides his diet, Minato-gao-1's teeth hold one other interesting clue about his life. You see, he's missing his two middle teeth in his lower jaw, and it doesn't look like it was just accidental. This is something that definitely happened before he died, and it looks like a custom we know of called dental ablation. This practice is found across parts of Asia for thousands of years, where teeth are specifically removed while the person is alive, presumably for ritual and cosmetic purposes. We'll see this even more in later eras, but it is interesting that it wasn't just some fad that shows up in one time and place, but something that people apparently did for thousands of years.

This is really something to think about. These were people, and while they didn't have malls, television, or the internet, we are and always have been social creatures. In this instance, we see a practice that likely helped identify a person as part of a group, possibly even some kind of status within that group. An adult, maybe married, maybe a father, we don't know exactly what it meant. But still, we can imagine a man in his mid to late 20s who probably had been out hunting with his family and friends for more than a decade already. He had loved and laughed and felt the full range of human emotions. Unlike today, with the concept of a steady job, it's likely that Minatogawa 1 had an unpredictable existence. While he probably knew his local area well and could tell when the fish were biting and where to find the best tubers, he and his family were constantly on the lookout for food, and year to year changes in the weather alone could have had a huge impact on his life. They would have had to carry their tools with them, so everyone has to pack light.

Now, how Minatogawa 1 met his end? It's unclear. He was not terribly old, and for all that the average mortality rate was likely low, if someone made it to adulthood, they likely had a good chance to live well into their 50s and 60s. But that was a horizon Minatogawa 1 would not live to see. Looks like he was between 20 and 30 years old when he passed away, as I mentioned before. He may have been killed, or he may have died of numerous natural causes. Heck, it's possible he died of starvation while stuck upside down in a limestone fissure, though there are several things that make us think that he may have been buried there after his death. Partly this is because of the selection of deer and boar bones that are found in the fissure. You see, it seems this fissure was being used as a trash heap, unless somehow deer and boar just happened to keep falling in. And it's not that big of a leap. A hole in the ground going who knows where? Well it's easy to see how people would decide that would be a great place to put their trash, rather than having it pile up nearby. And that may have included Minatogawa 1's corpse. So what was it? Was Minatogawa 1 simply thrown away as trash after he died? We don't know. There is more. This is actually a bit gruesome. Remember that I had mentioned another 4-8 individuals found in the same place? Well of all of those, only Minatogawa 1 was found as a complete skeleton, with his bones all in their relatively anatomically correct positions. The other women and one man are largely identified by bones that are scattered throughout the fissure, with bones from just one of the skeletons clearly deposited in two different areas. And all these bones were mixed up with the bones from the deer and wild boar, animals that were likely an early human food source. Indeed, the scattered bones are not dissimilar from what we would expect of the butchering process, and that includes the human remains. Could there have been a cannibalistic tradition 18,000 years ago? Certainly some of the skulls show damage that could have been caused by a fatal blow with a rock or other tool, which would suggest that they were killed, rather than dying of natural causes, and Minatogawa 1 himself does show signs of malnutrition. Perhaps these individuals were the victim of some ancient practice and then their remains were deposited into this trench afterwards, or even as part of some ritual. Now there have been cannibalistic cultural practices up into modern times, and human sacrifice is not unknown in Japan. On the other hand, many of the stories of cannibals tend to be overblown, and are more fanciful than factual. It certainly makes for a good story, but I want to caution about too much conjecture about this period. Perhaps there was just some custom of re-burrying bones at a later time, another practice found among certain cultures. There just isn't enough evidence to be sure. What we do know is that we see clear evidence that these are anatomically modern humans on the archipelago. While there aren't many human remains from the Northern Islands, the soil is just too acidic for most organic material to survive, we still have a few skeletal remains from isolated sites, a bit of bone here and there. For example, in Hamakita we find just five bone fragments of two individuals. They seem to date to the later Paleolithic, and were also found with the bones of other mammals, mostly deer, but also bones from a big cat like a leopard or tiger, though those appear to be several thousand years older than the human bones. And we also have evidence of humans from the mainland who show similar characteristics to the Minatogawa people, so it's likely that the people in Northern Japan were not dissimilar. Now, in addition to the fossil record, there is a new source of information that's been exploited in the past couple decades to shine further light on ancient origins. That's DNA. Now while skeletal information is often fragmentary at best, we can still use some of it for DNA evidence. This can tell us other things that a simple skeleton cannot. It can tell us more about an individual, but there are also traces of DNA that are passed down from one's parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. With modern techniques and sequencing, we're able to glean more information than ever before about ancient DNA and what it tells us about our ancestors. For the early inhabitants of Japan, we can see that the people living in the archipelago just after the Pleistocene appear to have a common ancestor with later Han Chinese populations, but they diverged about 18,000 to 38,000 years ago. That said, they actually share more in common with people from the East Asian coastal regions, this includes the Ulchi and indigenous culture in eastern Russia, Koreans, the original people of Taiwan, and people from the Philippines. This is consistent with the geological history we've been discussing, given the shallower seas and location of the island chain along the eastern coast of Asia. Alright, so what do we know about these early people then? Well, the original inhabitants of Japanese archipelago are likely nomadic tribes of people, moving across the plains and mountains in search of game. They may have hunted some of the larger animals such as elephants, elk, and bison that roamed the land, but would have likely relied heavily on smaller game for their day-to-day subsistence. They had no horses nor dogs to help them either. It's likely that they went fishing in the rivers, lakes, and surrounding ocean. Clearly they had boats that could bring them across the sea, and that would have helped them to move through the archipelago as well. While there may be the occasional planting of small herbs or other plants, there is no indication of any kind of purposeful agriculture, which means that rice cultivation, which is so central to the later Japanese culture, is still thousands of years off and wasn't even being grown on the mainland. This means that vegetables for their diet would have been those things they could find naturally occurring in the world around them. As mentioned before, the people of this period were working with stone tools, possibly tools made out of bone or wood, but we don't see pottery until much later, let alone any kind of metal. This means that while food may be roasted or eaten raw, we don't have any indication of the tools or utensils that would be expected for more elaborate preparations. Without agriculture, the fabric they would have had available for any type of clothing or similar adornment would have been limited as well. Silk in particular is eons away. They may have had clothing made from woven grass or even processed tree bark, and then leather and fur from the animals they hunted would have also been available to them. They found shelter where they could, or brought it with them, setting up temporary structures as needed. We have found evidence of some large campsites, but no firm evidence of any permanent structures. No post holes or other such indications of long term permanent habitation. They would have adapted to the warming and cooling periods over time, as humans did across the world, but just what form this took is unclear. Alright, so let's try to put all this together. So imagine a small family group, maybe 20-50 individuals, ranging from children to the elderly, with many more of the former than the latter. Though it is likely that most of those who made it to adulthood could easily expect to survive into their 50s and 60s at least. We would likely find them in a circular camp with an array of tents set up in a reasonably sized clearing. Whether dressed in a combination of leather, fur, possibly cloth made from bark or some other source. Woven grasses may also have been used. Likewise men and women may be adorned as humans have done for eons, whether this was the form of some kind of paint, shells, necklaces, or other art is unknown. We just don't have enough evidence. Adults may be missing teeth in symmetrical patterns, as with Minatogawa 1. Many of them are likely working their stone, wood, and bone implements, particularly those needed for hunting. They may also be weaving baskets or other such things. They probably have a fire going, they're roasting meat, possibly wrapping meat and vegetables in leaves such as the way we might use tin foil today. Other meat, fruit, and vegetables may be on wooden racks, drying out in the sun so they will have something to eat during the lean times. They will stay in the area probably for days or months, living off the land, hunting what they can. As game grows scarce, either with the change of seasons or because they have started to deplete the local fauna, then they will pick up and move. Without pack animals, they will need to carry everything themselves. This is not an easy time, but we can still assume that people were laughing, loving, and living as humans have done since time immemorial. What were their jokes and conversations about? What kind of music did they make? What games did they play? We may never know. What we do know is they thrived and survived through some of the harshest periods that the archipelago has seen.

Now Minatogawa 1 may have been running around as far back as 19,000 years ago. This was about the time when average global temperatures were at their lowest point. From then onward, the climate would start to change. Oak trees, which prior to 20,000 years ago had been mostly confined to the southern reaches of Kyushu, began to spread northward, indicating a warming climate. This means the glaciers would recede, temperatures would begin to warm, and sea levels would rise.

It is around this time, about 16,000 years ago, that we see something new and man-made on the scene: Pottery. Man-made objects created from formed clay. These were pieces that were both practical and artistic. Japanese pottery is some of the oldest pottery in the world, showing up well before equivalent techniques elsewhere. The early adoption of pottery, along with stone-ground tools, is a key feature that marks an end to the Paleolithic era. You see, in much of the world, pottery often follows a more settled and sedentary lifestyle, since potters need to be near the source of their clay and their kilns, and hauling pottery around, it is hardly convenient for a wandering tribe of hunter-gatherers. Oddly, however, we don't see a corresponding growth in agriculture. It is thought that the warming climate, and rich forests, streams, and ocean around Japan allowed groups to settle while still living off the land by hunting and gathering what they could, even as much of the megafauna died off. This is attested in part by the massive shell middens found at sites, huge mounds where shells and bones and other trash were piled up for hundreds or even thousands of years. Next few episodes, we'll talk more about this period, from roughly 16,000 to 2,500 years ago, known as the Jomon Period. For now, thank you for sticking with me through this overview. After the Jomon Period, we'll start to get into the yayoi, with the introduction of rice from the mainland, as well as metal weapons and tools, and then we'll get into the historical periods and start to see the various groups across the islands come under the sway of a single polity. Until then, thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time on Sengoku Daimyo's Japanese Chronicles.