What hunter-gatherers can tell us about fundamental human social networks

Long before the advent of social media, human social networks were built around sharing a much more essential commodity: food. Now, researchers reporting on the food sharing networks of two contemporary groups of hunter-gatherers in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 21 provide new insight into fundamental nature of human social organization.

The new work reveals surprising similarities between the Agta of the Philippines and Mbendjele of the Republic of Congo. In both places, individuals maintain a three-tiered social network that appears to buffer them against day-to-day shortfalls in foraging returns.

"Previous research has suggested that social networks across human cultures are structured in similar ways," says Mark Dyble of University College London. "Across societies, there appear to be similar limits on the number of social relationships individuals are able to maintain, and many societies are said to have a 'multilevel' structure. Our work on contemporary hunter-gatherer groups sheds light on how this distinctive social structure may have benefited humans in our hunting-and-gathering past."

While previous studies have identified similarities in social structure across hunter-gatherer populations, the researchers say that the new work is the first to explore how hunter-gatherers' distinctive, "multilevel" social organization structures social life and cooperation in important activities such as foraging and food sharing.

"No other apes share food to the extent that humans do," says Andrea Migliano, principal investigator of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Hunter-Gatherers Resilience Project. "Hunter-gatherers' multi-level social structure exists in different groups, to help regulate these cooperative systems. Furthermore, multi-level social structures regulate social rules, friendship and kinship ties, and the spread of social norms, promoting a more efficient sharing and cooperation. Sharing is a crucial adaptation to hunter-gatherers' lifestyles, central to their resilience -- and central to the evolution of mankind."

The Agta live in northeast Luzon, Philippines. Their primary source of protein is fish, supplemented by inter-tidal foraging, hunting, honey collecting, and gathering of wild foods. The Mbendjele live in an area spanning northern Republic of Congo and southern Central African Republic, where they hunt for meat in the forest. Both groups also trade wild-caught meat or fish for cultivated foods, including rice and manioc.

Dyble, Migliano, and their colleagues collected data on food sharing by living with the two communities for many months, making observations on how often households shared food with each other. From this they constructed social networks of food sharing.

"Although we had an idea of how camps split into food sharing clusters 'on the ground,' we were able to test these using algorithms which are able to identify sub-communities within the nine camps we studied," Dyble explains.

Their analysis showed that food sharing is closely related to social organization. In both communities, individuals maintain a three-tiered social network. First is their immediate household, most often consisting of five or six individuals, second is a cluster of three to four closely related households who share food frequently, and third is the wider camp.

"Despite being from different continents and living in very different ecologies, both groups of hunter-gatherers had a strikingly similar social organization," Dyble says.

"Cooperation and especially food sharing are essential for survival in a hunting-and-gathering economy," Dyble says. "The proverb that 'it takes a village to raise a child' is certainly true for hunter-gatherers, who, without food sharing to mitigate the day-to-day shortfalls in foraging, could simply not survive."

Dyble says that they now intend to explore the structure of other types of social networks in the hunter-gatherer communities, such as cooperation in childcare, and their overlap with food sharing.
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Reference:

Science Daily. 2016. “What hunter-gatherers can tell us about fundamental human social networks”. Science Daily. Posted: July 21, 2016. Available online: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160721142526.htm

Headdress reconstruction throws light on hunter-gatherer rituals

A research team led by archaeologists at the University of York used traditional techniques to create replicas of ritual headdresses made by hunter-gatherers 11,000 years ago in North Western Europe.

Flint blades, hammerstones and burning were among the tools and techniques they employed to fashion reproductions of shamanic headdresses discovered during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.

The research published today in PLOS ONE is the first scientific analysis of the oldest known evidence of a shamanic costume in Europe. It challenges previously held assumptions over the care and time invested in the modification of the animal's "skull cap" in order to create these ritualistic artefacts.

Instead the study, part of a five-year project supported by the European Research Council, Historic England and the Vale of Pickering Research Trust, suggests that hunter-gatherers achieved this through expedient manufacturing techniques. These may have involved packing the skull with damp clay and placing it in a bed of embers for up to four hours both to facilitate skin removal and make the bone easier to work.

Archaeologists unearthed a total 24 red deer headdresses at Star Carr representing around 90 percent of all such known artefacts across early prehistoric Europe. The artefacts are formed from the upper part of a male red deer skull with the antlers attached - the lower jaw and cranial bones having been removed and the frontal bone perforated.

The majority of the headdresses were discovered during archaeological investigations at Star Carr in the 1940s though researchers unearthed a further three during excavations in 2013. The most complete of these is likely to have come from a male adult red deer though the animal was 50 per cent larger than its modern counterparts.

Using techniques including 3D laser scanning allowed the team to observe and analyse a number of cut marks radiating out of perforations on both sides of the crania.

The researchers, which also involved researchers from the universities of Bradford, Chester, Manchester, Groningen and Leiden, concluded that hunter-gatherers were likely to have removed the head and superficially cleaned it before starting work on producing the headdress.

The first stage of the process may have involved removal of a large amount of antler possibly to reduce the weight of the headdress and make it easier to work. Some of the removed antler may have formed 'blanks' for the production of barbed projectile tips used for hunting and fishing.

But it is also possible that, in some cases, antler blank removal happened much later after the headdress had been used; in which case the process may have been a form of decommissioning of the headdress and/or the recycling of antler. The researchers say that given the amount of worked antler present at Star Carr, including over 200 barbed projectile tips, this is a plausible theory.

Lead author Dr Aimée Little, of the BioArCh research centre in the Department of Archaeology at York, said: "This research shows how experimental archaeology can give important insights into rare ancient artefacts. Knowing fire was used invokes a real sense of atmosphere surrounding the making of these ritual shamanic headdresses."

Professor Nicky Milner, co-director of the excavations at Star Carr, added: "These headdresses are incredibly rare finds in the archaeological record. This is the only site in Britain where they are found, and there are only a few other headdresses known from Germany. This work into how they might have been made has given us an important glimpse into what life was like 11,000 years ago."

Dr Andrew Wilson, Senior Lecturer and co-director of Bradford Visualisation in the School of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford, said: 'This exciting collaboration enabled the team to use a range of complementary 3D capture methods to document and investigate the modification of the deer crania at a variety of scales, before these waterlogged organic artefacts were subject to conservation treatment. This is a great showcase for how 3D documentation and analysis can transform our ability to understand objects of past societies."
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2016. “Headdress reconstruction throws light on hunter-gatherer rituals”. Phys.org. Posted: April 13, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-headdress-reconstruction-hunter-gatherer-rituals.html

Aboriginal female hunters aided by dingoes

In modern society dogs are often referred to as "man's best friend" but according to an archaeological review early Aboriginal society sported a similar relationship between women and dingoes (Canis lupus dingo).

The study by UWA and ANU suggests people formed close bonds with dingoes soon after the dogs' arrival on the mainland roughly 4000 years ago, with the dogs enabling women to contribute more hunted food.

UWA archaeologist Jane Balme, who led the research, says it is thought the first dingoes arrived on watercraft with people from South East Asia.

"What they're doing on the boat is not clear but if you're on a small boat 4000 years ago or so with people, then they probably came here as a domesticated animal," she says.

"But then when they got here they went wild."

Dr Balme says previously collected DNA evidence suggests dingoes could have been introduced at two locations, one in the Kimberley and one in the north-east of Australia.

She says it is likely Aboriginal people quickly formed close bonds with the dogs and early European colonisers recorded that dingoes were used by Aboriginals for a variety of purposes including as blankets and watch dogs.

In today's society dogs are sometimes used as watch dogs but have also been put to work to assist humans in other means such as aiding blind people or as therapy tools for sick or lonely people.

Evidence suggests dingoes would have cramped men's style

Dr Balme says most of the records considered in the study and anthropological observations suggest Aboriginal men did not take dingoes out when they went hunting because they would scare away large animals.

But Dr Balme's and ANU archaeologist Sue O'Connor's study reveals Aboriginals started to feed on a wider variety of small animals after the dingoes arrived in Australia.

This is based on previous archaeological digs of early occupation sites unearthing a wider range of animal bones, which dating techniques confirmed were placed there after the dingoes' arrival.

The research suggests this increase in the variety of animals eaten by Aboriginal people was because women used dingoes to hunt small animals such as goannas.

"We reviewed some of the evidence from archaeological sites, including Tunnel Cave in South West Australia, because it's long been noted that from mid-Holocene [4000-5000 years ago] that there is this change in fauna in many sites," Dr Balme says.

"We thought that maybe this change in fauna is the result of using dingoes as hunting dogs for small animals that are traditionally caught by women."
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Reference:

Wheeler, Michelle. 2016. “Aboriginal female hunters aided by dingoes”. Phys.Org. Posted: October 23, 2015. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2015-10-aboriginal-female-hunters-aided-dingoes.html

Saving Chilean mummies from climate change

At least two thousand years before the ancient Egyptians began mummifying their pharaohs, a hunter-gatherer people called the Chinchorro living along the coast of modern-day Chile and Peru developed elaborate methods to mummify not just elites but all types of community members -- men, women, children, and even unborn fetuses. Radiocarbon dating as far back as 5050 BC makes them the world's oldest human-made mummies.

But after staying remarkably well preserved for millennia, during the past decade many of the Chinchorro mummies have begun to rapidly degrade. To discover the cause, and a way to stop the deterioration, Chilean preservationists turned to a Harvard scientist with a record of solving mysteries around threatened cultural heritage artifacts.

Nearly 120 Chinchorro mummies are housed in the collection of the University of Tarapacá's archeological museum in Arica, Chile. That's where scientists noticed that the mummies were starting to visibly degrade at an alarming rate. In some cases, specimens were literally turning into a black ooze.

"In the last ten years, the process has accelerated," said Marcela Sepulveda, professor of archaeology in the anthropology department and Archeometric Analysis and Research Laboratories at the University of Tarapacá who specializes in materials characterization, during a recent visit to Cambridge. "It is very important to get more information about what's causing this and to get the university and national government to do what's necessary to preserve the Chinchorro mummies for the future."

What was eating the mummies? To help solve that riddle Sepulveda called on experts in Europe and North America, including Ralph Mitchell, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Biology, Emeritus at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Mitchell has used his knowledge of environmental microbiology to pinpoint the causes of decay in everything from historic manuscripts to the walls of King Tutankhamen's tomb to the Apollo space suits.

"We knew the mummies were degrading but nobody understood why," Mitchell said. "This kind of degradation has never been studied before. We wanted to answer two questions: what was causing it and what could we do to prevent further degradation?"

Preparing the mummies "was a complicated process that took time -- and amazing knowledge," Sepulveda said. The Chinchorro would first extract the brains and organs, then reconstruct the body with fiber, fill the skull cavity with straw or ash, and use reeds to sew it back together, connecting jaw to cranium. A stick kept the spine straight and tethered to the skull. The embalmer restored the skin in place -- sometimes patching the corpse together using the skin of sea lions or other animals. Finally, the mummy was covered with a paste, the color of which archeologists assign to different epochs in the more than 3,000 years of Chinchorro mummy-making -- black made from manganese was used in the oldest ones, red made from ocher in later examples, and brown mud had been applied to the most recent finds.

The first thing that Mitchell and his team needed was physical evidence, something Sepulveda supplied in the form of samples -- both degrading skin and undamaged skin -- taken from mummies in the museum's collection. The task of receiving the unusual shipment fell to Alice DeAraujo, a research fellow in Mitchell's lab who also played a lead role in analyzing the samples as part of her thesis for a master's degree in biology at Harvard Extension School.

It became apparent to DeAraujo and Mitchell that the degradation was microbial. Now they needed to determine if there was a microbiome on the mummy skin that was responsible.

"The key word that we use a lot in microbiology is opportunism," Mitchell said. "With many diseases we encounter, the microbe is in our body to begin with, but when the environment changes it becomes an opportunist."

Mitchell had a series of questions: "Is the skin microbiome from these mummies different from normal human skin? Is there a different population of microbes? Does it behave differently? The whole microbiology of these things is unknown."

The pair isolated microbes present in the samples of both the degrading skin and uncompromised skin. But since there was only a limited amount of mummy skin, they needed a surrogate for the next step: culturing the organisms in the lab and testing them to see what happened when the samples were exposed to different humidity levels. Using pig skin acquired from colleagues at Harvard Medical School, DeAraujo began a series of tests. After determining that the pig skin samples began to degrade after 21 days at high humidity, she repeated the results using mummy skin, confirming that elevated moisture in the air triggers damage to the skin. This finding was consistent with something that Sepulveda reported: humidity levels in Arica where the archeological museum is located have been on the rise.

DeAraujo's analysis suggested that the ideal humidity range for mummies kept in the museum was between 40 percent and 60 percent. Any higher and degradation could occur; any lower and equally damaging acidification was likely. Further testing is needed to assess the impact of temperature and light.

The results will help museum staff fine-tune temperature, humidity, and light levels to preserve the mummies in their extensive collection, Mitchell said. But he is keen to solve an even larger challenge.

According to Sepulveda and others there are large numbers -- perhaps hundreds -- of Chinchorro mummies buried just beneath the sandy surface in the valleys throughout the region. They are often uncovered during new construction and public works projects. Rising humidity levels may make the unrecovered mummies susceptible to damage as well. While the degradation process is relatively controlled at the museum, it is worse in sites exposed to the natural environment.

"What about all of the artifacts out in the field?" Mitchell asks. "How do you preserve them outside the museum? Is there a scientific answer to protect these important historic objects from the devastating effects of climate change?"

The solution to the challenge of preserving the 7,000-year-old Chinchorro mummies, Mitchell believes, may draw from 21st-century science. "You have these bodies out there and you're asking the question: How do I stop them from decomposing? It's almost a forensic problem."

Others who contributed to the research include Vivien Standen, Bernardo Arriaza, and Mariela Santos of the University of Tarapacá, and Philippe Walter from the Laboratoire d'Archéologie Moléculaire et Structurale in Paris.

The work was supported by Harvard SEAS, Consejo Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica in Chile and the Universidad de Tarapacá.
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Reference:

Science Daily. 2015. “Saving Chilean mummies from climate change”. Science Daily. Posted: March 9, 2015. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150309093212.htm

From surf to turf: Archaeologists and chemists trace ancient British diets

The change by our ancestors from hunter-gathers to farmers is one of the most intensively researched aspects of archaeology. Now a large-scale investigation of British archaeological sites dating from around 4,600 BC to 1,400 AD has examined millions of fragments of bone and analysed over 1,000 cooking pots.

The team, led by Professor Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, developed new techniques in an effort to identify fish oils in the pots. Remarkably, they showed that more than 99 per cent of the earliest farmer's cooking pots lacked sea food residues.

Other clues to ancient diets lie within human bones themselves, explored by the Cardiff group led by Dr Jacqui Mulville. The sea passes on a unique chemical signature to the skeletons of those eating seafood; while the early fisher folk possessed this signature it was lacking in the later farmers.

Lead author of the study, Dr Lucy Cramp said: "The absence of lipid residues of marine foods in hundreds of cooking pots is really significant. It certainly stacks up with the skeletal isotope evidence to provide a clear picture that seafood was of little importance in the diets of the Neolithic farmers of the region."

Returning to the pots, the Bristol team used a compound-specific carbon isotope technique they have developed to identify the actual fats preserved in the cooking pots, showing that dairy products dominated the menu right across Britain and Ireland as soon as cattle and sheep arrived.

The ability to milk animals was a revolution in food production as, for the first time humans did not have to kill animals to obtain food. As every farmer knows, milking stock requires a high level of skill and knowledge.

In view of this, team member, Alison Sheridan from the National Museum of Scotland concludes that: "The use of cattle for dairy products from the earliest Neolithic confirms the view that farming was introduced by experienced immigrants."

Viewed together the findings show that Early British hunters feasted on venison and wild boar and ate large quantities of sea food, including seals and shellfish. With the introduction of domestic animals some 6,000 years ago they quickly gave up wild foods and fishing was largely abandoned, and people adopted a new diet based around dairying.

Dr Cramp continued: "Amazingly, it was another 4,000 years before sea food remains appeared in pots again, during the Iron Age, and it was only with the arrival of the Vikings that fish became a significant part of our diet."

Dr Mulville said: "Whilst we like to think of ourselves as a nation of fish eaters, with fish and chips as our national dish, it seems that early British farmers preferred beef, mutton and milk."

Why people changed so abruptly from a seafood to farming diet remains a mystery. Professor Evershed said: "Since such a clear transition is not seen in the Baltic region, perhaps the hazardous North Atlantic waters were simply too difficult to fish effectively until new technologies arrived, making dairying the only sustainable option."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “From surf to turf: Archaeologists and chemists trace ancient British diets”. EurekAlert. Posted: February 12, 2014. Available online: ttp://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/uob-fst021214.php

Common bias known as the 'endowment effect' not present in hunter-gatherer societies

Centuries of economic theory have been based on one simple premise: when given a choice between two items, people make the rational decision and select the one they value more. But as with many simple premises, this one has a flaw in that it is demonstrably untrue.

The fields of psychology and behavioral economics have experimentally identified a laundry list of common biases that cause people to act against their own apparent interests. One of these biases — the mere fact of possessing something raises its value to its owner — is known as the "endowment effect."

A new interdisciplinary study from the University of Pennsylvania has delved into whether this bias is truly universal, and whether it might have been present in humanity's evolutionary past.

The study was led by Coren Apicella, an assistant professor in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychology, and Eduardo Azevedo, an assistant professor in Wharton's Department of Business Economics and Public Policy. They collaborated with Yale's Nicholas Christakis and the University of California, San Diego's James Fowler.

It will be published in the Common Bias Known as the 'Endowment Effect' Not Present in Hunter-Gatherer SocietiesCommon Bias Known as the 'Endowment Effect' Not Present in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.

A classic endowment effect experiments involves giving participants one of two items, such as a chocolate bar and a mug, and then asking whether they would like to trade for the other. As the starting item is selected at random, there should be a 50 percent chance that participants initially receive the item they like best and thus a 50 percent chance that they will trade.

"What we see, however, is that people trade only about 10 percent of the time," Azevedo said. "Simply telling someone they own something makes them value it more. That is, the way you ask the question changes what item people prefer, unlike what you would expect from rational economic behavior."

One problem with these experiments is that they generally involve participants from so-called "WEIRD" — western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic — societies. Apicella drew on her decade-long study of the Hadza people of Tanzania to provide a new perspective. The Hadza are one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth, living in small, nomadic camps that communally share nearly all their possessions.

"We wanted to examine whether the endowment effect was something that occurs in non-WEIRD societies, since they represent the vast majority of human populations that have ever existed," Apicella said. "Even if it's not a perfect window into our past, it's at least a different perspective than what you get when you study your average college student. The fact that the Hadza remain relatively isolated from Western culture, media and ideals makes them a good group with which to investigate the history and universality of biases like the endowment effect."

The history of the endowment effect is of particular interest to evolutionary psychologists, as experiments to test its presence in non-human primates, such as orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas, has been met with mixed results. That some non-human primates exhibit the bias could mean that it was present in the last common ancestor between them and humans, but it could also mean that they learned the behavior by participating in other reward-based studies.

The area of North Tanzania where the Hadza live provided a natural way to further investigate the role of culture in transmitting this bias, as a large lake separates some, but not all, of the camps from a nearby village. People living in the camps on the near side of the lake have much more frequent interactions with tourists and commerce, often buying items from stores in the village, or selling bows and arrows to visitors.

The researchers conducted versions of the endowment effect experiment in several different camps, and compared the results.

In order to avoid bias from items that might be more or less valuable in the environment the Hadza live in, the researchers constructed the experiments so that participants chose between items that had only cosmetic differences. Participants would be given either a package of cookies, with the option to trade it for a different flavor, or given a lighter, with the option to trade it for a different color. They also ensured that the participant knew that the variety he or she received at the start was a random choice, and varied whether the participant got to physically hold the item before given the option to trade it for another variety.

"We wanted to use both food and tools, as experiments with non-human primates show an endowment effect for the former but not the latter," Apicella said. "However, we saw that it didn't make a difference whether a person was choosing between cookies or lighters. The difference-maker was their relative level of isolation from modern life."

"The more isolated Hadza traded about 50 percent of the time — which is what rational people should do," Azevedo said. People near the village traded about 25 percent of the time, which is much closer to the 10 percent we see with Western students."

"To make sure this wasn't a case of the more capitalistic people moving closer to the village, we also asked the people about their social networks," Azevedo said. "The percentage of people who named someone in a distant camp was very small. Quantitatively, it seems impossible that the difference in endowment effect between two camps could be explained by migration."

With that potential caveat accounted for, one explanation for the apparent lack of an endowment effect in the more isolated camps is that the bias is a learned behavior that comes with exposure to capitalistic societies. However, an alternative explanation could be that both groups experience the effect, but it is suppressed in the more communal groups by social pressures.

"We need to study this further to see which explanation holds," Apicella said. "Either way the results suggest that these isolated hunter-gatherers are more rational than the average western consumer when it comes to economic decisions."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Common bias known as the 'endowment effect' not present in hunter-gatherer societies”. EurekAlert. Posted: October 28, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uop-cbk102813.php

British Men May Have a Hunter-Gatherer Past

British men may trace their lineage back to hunter-gatherers, not farmers as had previously been suspected.

A new genetic lineage study finds that, contrary to previous research, British men do not descend from immigrant farmers who migrated west from the Near East around 10,000 years ago. Instead, the new study finds that a common Y-chromosome gene in today's British men traces back to hunter-gatherers who settled in Europe long before farming got popular.

In a study first published online in August 2010 in the European Journal of Human Genetics, researchers from the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Utah reported that a certain genetic mutation on the Y chromosome (male sex chromosome) was most common in the southeast of Europe and much less prevalent on the British Isles and other northwestern regions. This southeast-northwest pattern matched the spread of the Linearbandkeramik, or Linear Pottery, culture, a Neolithic culture known for their pottery kitchen dishes.

Another study, this one published in the journal PLoS Biologyin 2010, also argued that a group of people who carried a certain set of genes known as haplogroup R1b1b2 (R-M269) could trace their ancestry to the Neolithic expansion of farming cultures from the east. About 110 million European men are in this group.

But the new paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, uses a larger dataset of more than 10,000 Europeans, Near Easterners and West Asians. In this comprehensive dataset, the researchers found, the previously reported southeast-northwest gradient didn't appear. Multiple R-M269 subgroups are common in different parts of Europe, the researchers wrote, suggesting that various hunter-gatherer groups radiated outward from different areas to populate Europe.

According to Dr Cristian Capelli, the Oxford geneticist who led the research, the study "resets" the debate on the peopling of Europe.

"Our works overturns the recent claims of European Y chromosomes being brought into the continent by farmers," Capelli said in statement.
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References:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2011. "British Men May Have a Hunter-Gatherer Past". Live Science. Posted: August 24, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/15745-british-men-hunter-gatherer-ancestors.html

Origins of the Japanese

A team of researchers have been delving into the origins of the Japanese people, with some interesting findings. The research was centred on a study of Japanese dialects with the aim of finding the roots of the language.

The language family is known as Japonic and this includes Japanese and a similar language called Ryukyuan, which is spoken in the chain of islands to the south of Japan.

Comparing the cultures

Whilst genetically, the modern Japanese are descended from two main migrant streams, the Jōmon culture and the Yayoi culture, the linguistic roots have now been determined as originating from the Yayoi.

Archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jōmon culture and rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture

Archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jōmon culture and rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The hunter-gatherers arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age around 20,000 years ago, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They remained isolated until about 2,400 years ago when wet rice agriculture developed in southern China and was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, but that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, though still leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

The linguistic link was provided by a method known as the ‘Bayesian phylogeny’. This uses a computer to map several language trees employing a limited vocabulary of approximate 200 words which are known to evolve slowly.

By feeding all the data from the dialect studies into this computer model, a date of 2,182 years ago was predicted for the origin of Japonic, and this fits with the arrival of the Yayoi.

Whilst John B Whitman, of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo refers to the results as “solid and reasonable”, other linguists are far more sceptical.

A question of identity

“There has been a gap in thinking,” said Hisao Baba, curator of anthropology at the National Science Museum in Tokyo. “Archaeology has made a lot of progress, but politics has made it difficult for the general public to take a critical look at their own past.”

The question of origin cuts to the core of Japan’s identity as they have long celebrated themselves as ethnically unique.

As such, archaeology in Japan until the 1950s had to conform to accepted belief and all archaeological deposits in Japan, no matter how old, were left by ancestors of the modern Japanese. Japanese archaeologists said Japan’s gene pool had remained isolated since the end of the last ice age, over 20,000 years ago.

Confronted with evidence that a sudden change had swept Japan in about 400 BCE — replacing the millennia-old Jōmon hunter-gatherer culture with a society that could grow rice and forge both iron weapons and tools — archaeologists attributed it to nothing more than technological borrowing from the mainland rather than influx of a people. Even although recent analysis of skull shapes has shown the rice farmers who appeared 2,400 years ago were quite different from the hunters whom they replaced, it is still difficult for the Japanese to take this on board.
Tatetsuki, Okayama, Japan.

Direct comparisons between Jōmon and Yayoi skeletons show that the two peoples are noticeably distinguishable. The Jōmon tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography. They also have strikingly raised brow ridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people, on the other hand, averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat brow ridges and noses. By the Kofun period (250 to 538 AD) almost all skeletons excavated in Japan, except those of the Ainu and prehistoric Okinawans, resemble those of modern day Japanese.

Many Japanese people want to believe that their distinctive language and culture required uniquely complex developmental processes. To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.

This recent study of linguistic evidence may be further proof of a more complex history and genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jōmon people, with the Jōmon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. However it was the Yayoi language that prevailed, along with their agricultural technology.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2011. "Origins of the Japanese". Past Horizons. Posted: June 15, 2011. Available online: http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/06/2011/origins-of-the-japanese