Study of ancient Japanese hunter-gatherers suggests warfare not inherent

Chad

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
Does it also imply that they didn't experience violent events too? ALso, are these the 'true Japanese' - who have beards and different cultural styles of dress etc...? (i'll look for the name later) Because apparently the current Japanese are maybe from the mainland? I don't know myself.

The artifacts discovered during that period - not mentioned in the artcle - are very interesting, i think. Do they remind me of the Venus of Willendorf? I'll check that too. Perhaps this supports the idea of a new world, violence free, and that it is possible.

Study of ancient Japanese hunter-gatherers suggests warfare not inherent in human nature
March 30, 2016 by Bob Yirka report

(Phys.org)—A team of Japanese researchers (and one from the U.K.) has found evidence in the remains of ancient Japanese people that suggests that people are not necessarily predisposed to living a violent existence or even to engaging in warfare. In their paper published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the team describes their analysis of the remains of people that lived during the Jomon period (from 13,000 – 800 BC) in what is now Japan, which showed very little evidence of violent behavior or death.

In recent years, scientists have found evidence of many hunter-gatherer groups that behaved in a violent manner, sometimes even banding together to wage war on other people or groups. That has led to more evidence of the common assumption that humans are inherently violent and that war has generally been the result when two or more groups have different ideas of how things should be done. In this new effort, the researchers suggest such findings might be premature as they have found an example of an early hunter-gatherer culture that did not appear to wage war or even behave in a violent manner.

The teams' study consisted of analyzing the remains of approximately 2,500 people that lived in Japan during the Jomon period, looking for examples of violence, e.g. broken or damaged bones. The team reports that they found evidence of violence in just 1.8 percent of all the adult bones represented and in just 0.89 percent of the population as a whole. A very low number compared to the 12 to 14 percent seen in other hunter-gatherer populations of around the same time period (which strongly suggested a violent existence). This, the researchers claim, suggests that the people of that time lived peacefully among themselves and did not conduct war against others that might have lived nearby. And that, they add, suggests that humans may not be quite as predisposed to violence as others have suggested, which counters other arguments that it was warfare that led people to band together into groups forming communities that allowed for the promotion of intra-group altruism and even more advanced warfare against other such groups—a selective from of evolutionary behavior.

Explore further: New genetic evidence resolves origins of modern Japanese

More information: Hisashi Nakao et al. Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period, Biology Letters (2016). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0028

Abstract
Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter–gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.

Journal reference: Biology Letters search and more info website
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Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html#jCp

Apparently they named the figure Jomon Venus.
Jomon Venus
dogularge.jpg



A different artifact from the era.
106_107-TN-jomon.jpg


Dogu were found all over Japan with northern Japan Dogu first appeared in early Jomon but began to flourish in Middle Jomon through Late Jomon., the Tohoku region, yielding the most variety. (For a timeline outlining the development of Japanese pottery, please click here.) Many of them have the distinctive Jomon rope-cord patterns while others have been intricately carved with arabesque-like designs. Some in outer-space garb are known as the "goggles type" and no explanation is needed for that naming. Whatever the markings, they are all eerily moving and can't help but spark one's imagination in wondering about life so many thousand of years ago, and the miracle it is today.

As Joseph Campbell once wrote: "Take, for example, a pencil, ashtray, anything, and holding it before you in both hands (in this case looking at dogu), regard it for awhile. Forgetting its name and use, yet continuing to regard it, ask yourself seriously, What is it? Its dimension of wonder opens, for the mystery of the being of that thing is identical with the mystery of the being of the universe, and yourself."
_http://www.e-yakimono.net/html/jomon-dogu.html

Added: The Venus of Willendorf
Willendorf-Venus-1468.jpg
 
(An old post, but since Vulcan59 revived it!)
And that, they add, suggests that humans may not be quite as predisposed to violence as others have suggested, which counters other arguments that it was warfare that led people to band together into groups forming communities that allowed for the promotion of intra-group altruism and even more advanced warfare against other such groups—a selective from of evolutionary behavior.
A better hypothesis is that intra-group altruism was part-and-parcel of tribal life, e.g. the cooperation necessary for large-game hunting. But warfare did contribute to forms of social cooperation on a scale larger than basic tribes - the necessity to band together to protect from greater foes in complex chiefdoms, archaic states, empires, and modern states. That part of the warfare hypothesis seems pretty solid at this point (see the books and papers by Peter Turchin, for example, like Ultrasociety). Population pressures seem to have been important in this regard in the past 10k years or so. As long as overall population remains low, and land plentiful, violence is low. More people, more competition over land, more intertribal violence.

As for the Jomon period, followed by the Yayoi, they too seem to fit the pattern:

We collected demographic information based on burial jars (kamekan) and the frequency of violence based on the ratio of injured individuals. The results are consistent with the hypothesis, i. e., high population density can promote inter-group violence.
The northern Kyushu region of Japan has received much attention for investigations of inter-group violence in the Japanese archipelago. The subsistence strategy in the Yayoi period (800 cal BC to AD 250 CE), wet rice cultivation, was introduced by immigrants from the Korean peninsula along with weapons such as stone arrowheads and daggers, resulting in enclosed settlements accompanied by warfare or large-scale inter-group violence (e.g., Sahara 1986; Nakahashi 2005; Hashiguchi 2007; Matsugi 2007; Terasawa 2000). As indicated by recent exhaustive surveys of skeletal remains in Japan (Nakao et al., 2016, 2020; Naka-gawa et al., 2017), this represents a significant increase in the frequency of violence compared with the population of the preceding Jomon period, pottery makers who followed a complex hunter-gatherer life-style and exhibited low levels of mortality due to conflict, in contrast with anthropological and ethnographical studies arguing the ubiquity of inter-group violence among present and prehistoric hunter-gatherers (e.g., Keeley 1996; LeBlanc 2003; Bowles 2009; Frayer and Martin 1997; Allen and Allen 2006; 2014; Allen and Jones 2014; Schwitalla et al., 2014; Lahr et al., 2016). The number of skeletal remains with trauma out of the total samples is 23 out of 2576 for the Jomon period and 100 out of 3298 for the Yayoi period. Chi-squared tests showed statistically significant differences between the two periods ... In addition to evidence for intensified violence in the Yayoi period, Nakagawa et al. (2017) reported that injured skeletal remains tended to cluster in the Kinki region (the central area of the Japanese archipelago) and northern Kyushu region (in the southern part of the archipelago) of the Middle Yayoi period (350 cal BC to AD 25 CE).
 
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