The shadow of the Emishi

Randy McDonald just pointed me to a 2008 paper in AJHG, Japanese Population Structure, Based on SNP Genotypes from 7003 Individuals Compared to Other Ethnic Groups: Effects on Population-Based Association Studies. It speaks to an issue I brought up earlier in my post, Sons of the farmers, the story of Japan, which describes the ethnogenesis of the Japanese modern people from the Yayoi culture. The Yayoi presumably brought rice from the Asian mainland, probably from what is today southern Korea. But the Japanese islands were not uninhabited before this period. Japan was home to the Jomon culture, which has a rather storied history in the annals of archaeology. The Jomon seem to have been a predominantly hunter-gatherer population which was also sedentary, and engaged in the production of objects such as pottery which are normally associated with more advanced farming societies. I have a difficult time crediting the ~13,000 year period of continuous development which is attributed to the Jomon, but, it does seem likely that the period between 2,000 and 2,500 years before the present did mark a sharp cultural discontinuity in the …