Naoko Matsumoto

Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period.

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.

Effective distribution coefficients and growth rates of a binary dilute solid solution controlled by kink kinetics and volume diffusion

Effective distribution coefficients and growth rates of a binary dilute solid solution growing from dilute surroundings are derived for the steady state using a model in which kinetics operating at kink sites and volume diffusion in the surroundings are taken into account.

Subsistence, Sedentism, and Social Complexity among Jomon Hunter-Gatherers of the Japanese Archipelago

Jomon is the name of the prehistoric period and culture on the Japanese Archipelago that follows the Paleolithic Period and precedes the agricultural Yayoi Period. Most scholars agree that the date of the oldest pottery in Japan (ca. 16,000 cal. BP) marks the beginning of the Jomon Period. The end of the Jomon Period is still controversial. In Kyushu, the transition from the Jomon to the Yayoi Period may have occurred as early as 2900–2800 cal. BP, but in northern Honshu, the end of the Jomon Period is likely to have been as late as 2400–2300 cal. BP. Because the Jomon Period lasted for more than 10,000 years, and because the geographic characteristics within the Japanese Archipelago vary significantly, Jomon culture shows marked temporal and spatial variability. This chapter reviews recent developments in Jomon archaeology with an emphasis on two different Jomon cultural trajectories in eastern and western Japan from the Initial to Final Jomon Periods. We conclude that Jomon archaeology is moving forward from a phase of data accumulation based on the results of a large number of rescue excavations to one of data organization and interpretation. New lines of archaeological evidence, including results of chemical and scientific analyses, can help archaeologists tackle key questions that still remain unanswered.

Visualizing Migration of Demographic Simulation in Prehistoric and Protohistoric Periods

In this paper, we report two methods to visualize migration of people in an artificial society. The artificial society system we target have been developed for simulating demographic changes in prehistoric and protohistoric periods in Japan. The system is capable of long term simulation of demographic changes in and migration between areas. We visualize migration from two perspectives: global view and family view. Global view focuses on the flow of people in migration. Family view focuses family relations in migration and visualizes it with a graph.

Cultural and Genetic Transmission in the Jomon–Yayoi Transition Examined in an Agent-Based Demographic Simulation

Agent-based simulation is used to obtain useful insights regarding genetic and cultural transmission in order to construct a model explaining the prehistoric demographic and cultural dynamics of the transition from the Jomon to Yayoi periods in western Japan. The Jomon–Yayoi transition is an East Asian case of hunter-gatherer to farmer transition in which drastic socio-cultural changes in subsistence, material culture, and settlement structure occurred. A simulation for 500 years shows that cultural skill can spread quickly without much loss in the case of biased transmission, even when the migration rate is very low, and that the spread of cultural skill without significant genetic influence is possible even when cultural transmission is restricted to between relatives. The result gives an inspiration for possible explanatory models of the Jomon–Yayoi transition in which indigenous people play more significant roles in areas remote from the locus of Yayoi cultural origin.

Correction to: ‘Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period’

[ Biol. Lett. 12 , 20160028. (Published online 30 March 2016) ([doi:10.1098/rsbl.2016.0028][2])][2] After publication of our article, we found that Kamikuroiwa Iwakage site was wrongly categorized to the Early Jomon phase and counted doubly in the electronic supplementary material; however, the