(1) The Japanese archipelago today is one of old, entrenced cultures, political unity & relative ethnic uniformity. Yet the Yamato - the proper name of those often called simply the "Japanese ppl" - are not the only, nor the first on the islands
(2) Crucial to understanding any further discussion of Japan's past is the fact that the Yamato, much like the Celts and Teutons of the British isles, arrived in Japan as migrants & invaders - roughly at the same time the first Celts crossed into Britain, in fact.
(3) To begin our exploration of Japan's creation, we have to go back - far, far back, to the cold and desolate world of the Pleistocene, perhaps 40,000 years ago, when the Japanese archipelago was still connected to the mainland, and the first humans reached the area.
(4) Even while land still bridged the archipelago to the mainland, the Japanese region was an isolated place. The genetic split between the first Japanese and the mainland predates that between the East Asians and the folk who first crossed into the Americas.
(5) The word means Jōmon means "cord-marked", and was in fact first coined by American orientalist Edward S. Morse, before being adapted into Japanese. The word refers to their particular style of pottery, the practice of which began in the isles as early as 15kya.
(6) Of the culture of the ancient Jōmon, little can be said with certainty. Quite probably shamanistic, a characteristic of their culture was the production of "dogū"-figurines, typically animalic or, if humanoid, Venus-like.
They lived in pit-houses and limited, tribal units.
(7) With 40ky of history, the Jōmon would certainly have been not 1 but many cultures & languages. Nor were they utterly insulated, despite their isolation. In their ancestry are traces from maritime East-Asia, including, fascinatingly, Austronesian-related peoples.
(8) The end of the Jōmon period, and, ultimately, their culture and people began not in Japan, but in neighboring Korea. There, 1500 BC saw the dawning of the Mumun period, and with it, the advent of complex agriculture and social hierarchy.
(9) A megalithic culture, the Mumun produced large dolmens like those in Neolithic Europe. They were also the first to import tools and weapons of bronze, though it was not produced locally until 8th century BC. Though not predominating, rice-farming first reached Korea here.
(10) Crucially, the late Mumun period also sees the first appearance of Mumun-like settlements in Japan, on the southerly island of Kyushu. Here, for the first time, is evidence of substantial movement of foreigners into Japan, and with them, settled life and agriculture.
(11) Though linguistic evidence is necessarily scarce here, everything points towards at least the southern parts of the Korean peninsula being the Urheimat of the Japonic languages. Like the insular Celtic languages, Proto-Japonic as we know it likely split post-migration.
(12) The reasons for this migration of early agriculturalist Japonic-speakers across the sea and into Japan are likely diverse and multifaceted, but a very likely factor was the ongoing invasion of Korea by the iron-wielding Kanjin, eventual ancestors of today's Koreans.
(13) This transition is confused by the separate periodisations used by Korean & Japanese, but in Japan, this appearance of identifiably Mumun practices circa 300 BC marks the beginning of the Yayoi period, and with it, the end of the Japanese Paleolithic and the Jōmon period.
(14) I do not have time here to discuss the ultimate ending of the Jōmon people, of their development into the Emishi-tribes and, through admixture with Siberians, the Ainu, nor of the long wars between the Emishi and the rising Yamato empire. This, in the end, was but a prelude.
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Why is it that "primitive horticulturalists" - i.e. peoples such as the Dani of Papua or the Yanomami or Pirahã of South America - seem to tend towards a sort of "atheistic supernaturalism," believing in a world of invisible, often malicious spirits, but without any higher, organising powers, whilst both more sophisticated cultures *and* more primitive hunter-gathers seem to tend towards theistic cosmologies?
What happens in the jungle vegetable gardens?
This is a genuinely strange phenomenon - there is a remarkable coalescence between the "style" of cosmology found among Papuans, Amazonians and certain Congolese tribes, all extremely distantly related but united by a common climate and lifestyle. Yet this "vegetable garden spirituality," though highly consistent among similar rainforest-dwelling Neolithics, is markedly aberrant compared to what we see both among true hunter-gatherers and more complex societies.
"Hunter-gatherer-grade cultures," from the various Aboriginal tribes to the San Bushmen, the Hadza and various North American peoples tend to have "higher-level" theistic cosmologies, i.e. cosmologies with clear mono- or polytheistic figures exercising demiurgic functions, though (usually) less strongly developed than in complex, urban societies.
The area of what was once Gaul went through a truly remarkable process of ethnogenesis in the period between 1-600 AD.
From a barely romanized, still essentially Iron Age Celtic culture to Christian, Germanized Gallo-Romans, all the while retaining mostly the same ancestry.
Most people probably don't realize - I certainly didn't, originally - that the Gaulish language was still widely spoken throughout Gallia at the time of the Frankish conquest. It was the *Franks*, ironically, who completed the "Romanization" process.
This sort of thing is not too uncommon, actually - you have an initial tension between a colonized and a colonizer group, which may persist for generations until a *third* group conquers both, thus relativizing and diminishing the original conflict and hastening assimilation.
A striking takeaway of the last 10 years of the aDNA revolution - from the Indo-Europeans, to the Bantu, to the Swahili, to the Japanese - is that you might sooner trust a toddler to pick out a 50-meter target with a revolver than an archaeologist to identify an ancient migration
It should be self-evident that we cannot simply derive from this a reverse principle, and conclude that wherever contemporary archaeologists denied a purported migration, it really did take place - yet the scope of the discrediting is remarkable.
What are we to make of as-yet unresolved fine-grained questions, such as the Dorian invasion, the Hebrew conquest of Canaan or other traditional narratives long contested by the now-dubious consensus? Again, we cannot simply default to the inverse conclusion, but one wonders.
"Real, unembellished history" according to quite a number of historians seems to consist largely of ppl sitting around, munching bread and porridge, between periodic bursts of fighting over miscellaneous economic factors.
>Knight is recorded as composing a poem to persuade his captor lord to free him:
"Bet that happened lol"
>King gives a stirring speech before battle:
"Sure that happened"
>Viking is heads out to Constantinople, motivated by a dream:
"Definitely not embellished mhm"
Never underestimate a dusty historian's ability to regard as improbable literally any display of human spontaneity, whimsy or unconditioned willpower.
This is only half true. Rwanda is a cohesive, fairly well-run and (by regional standards) prosperous and stable country. The Congo, it is true, is essentially not a real state, hence why the massive size disparity between it and Rwanda confers no military advantage.
It is an interesting quirk of the global export of the nation state system that we aren't really able to account for "unorganized regions" anymore. With the exception of Antarctica, every plot of land *must* be attached to a specific polity with a government and a flag.
This works well enough in some parts of the world, but it obviously fails elsewhere, where the reality on the ground simply fails to match the internationally recognised construct. The Darién Gap is only "part" of Panama and Colombia in the most tenuously nominal sense.
There is a phenomenon I've noticed a lot in many contemporary walks of life - term it "introductionism": ppl never actually reading primary literature, or watching classical movies, or engaging directly with high art, but interacting with everything through "accessible" mediums
In a world of limited time, I've come around to the realisation that 8/10 times, instead of reading a book ABOUT Shakespeare, read Shakespeare. Read Plato. Just read that book you want to get to, don't read endless books ABOUT reading that book.
"You can just do things", but for literature and the other arts.
Sure, you might need some help to interpret, say, Aristotle or Hegel - so maybe get a complimentary book to help you, or read a brief introduction to the core concepts, but *do not* then stop there.