Japan - Incipient Jomon

  General Description   "Following the discovery of ’pre-Jomon’ pottery in Kyushu and elsewhere, Yamanouchi added an earlier stage that he called Soso-ki (the ’grass-roots’ stage). It has been adopted by some and rejected by others on the ground that the pottery is not ’Jomon’ and that the subsistence system of this phase was Paleolithic-style hunting. Some Westerners use this term, which I call Subearliest in order to distin- guish the phase from, and to show its relationship to, Earliest Jomon. Some prefer ’Incipient’.
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"By and large, the sites of this phase are rather few, and their cultural content is relatively meager. Bone fishhooks, usually not barbed, were rapidly improved along the northern coast. Arrowheads were small, used more frequently by inland hunters. Plant bulbs and starchy roots were dug with large, adzlike tools that were made of sandstone, slate, or other soft stone. Nuts and possibly seeds were pulverized with grinding stones. Hanawadai in Ibaragi Prefecture is the first recognizable Earliest Jomon community site. Five house pits lying about 10 meters apart contained two successive Hanawadai pottery subtypes, probably meaning that not more than three houses were occupied at any one time. The little bands of occupants could hardly have numbered more than ten or fifteen. One pit is not quite square, measuring 4.6 by 3.8 meters, and has twelve holes for posts. Outdoor fireplaces were used. Seemingly inconvenient bullet-shaped pots stood upright in the soft, loose surface soil. Dogs were kept around the house, the Canis familiaris japonica (small, short-haired, Spitz-like dogs) that were perhaps ancestors of the present-day Shiba.
"Most of the few human skeletons excavated from sites of this phase have been found intentionally buried among the shells, lying on their backs in flexed positions. They dramatize the severe conditions faced by the people of that day. The earliest known Jomon man was uncovered in 1949 below a shell layer in the Hirasaka shell mound in Yokohoma City. He stood rather tall for a Jomon person: about 163 centimeters. His lower left molars were worn down to the jawbone, probably caused by years of pulling leather thongs across them, and X-rays of his bones showed growth interruptions, interpreted as near-fatal spells of extreme malnutrition during childhood. The joints testify to early aging. Virtually unused wisdom teeth are partial evidence for a life expectancy of about thirty years, an estimated average through the Middle Jomon, with an increase of only one year during the next two millennia, until the adoption of rice as a dietary staple.
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"Koyama Shuzo calculated the population of the Earliest Jomon to be around 21,900. Inhabitants had moved to higher land in the valleys of the lower-central mountains and established communities to the north-east. Concentration in these areas throughout most of the Jomon period can be accounted for by a variety and abundance of plant, mammal, and sea life, where northern and southern environmental zones overlap in central Japan. With the exception of the Latest Jomon, and possibly the Middle Jomon, the Kanto sites are usually more numerous and frequently larger. Over half of the Earliest Jomon population was strung out along the banks of Kanto streams, with ready access to water supplies, for the same reason that earlier and later people - amounting to teeming millions in modern times - congregated there." ^[1]

[1]: (Kidder, Jr. 2008, 60-61)