Abstract
Humans arrived in the Japanese Archipelago by at least 38 Ka (thousand years) ago. Between 40 and 30 Ka ago when sea levels were lowered by 80 m the three islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu combined to form the Paleo-Honshu Island. The islands of Hokkaido and Sakhalin were connected to Russia as the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido Peninsula. The straits of Korea and Tsugaru remained open even during the LGM. Anatomically modern humans occupied Okinawa and Ishigaki islands by 36.5 and 27 Ka ago, respectively. Another group accessed Paleo-Honshu by crossing the 40 km wide Korea Strait. Their assemblages contained edge ground axes that could have felled trees and hollowed out the trunks to form dug-out canoes. The assemblages included backed blades made on high-quality lithic materials, such as obsidian. Obsidian from Kozu Island was utilized on Paleo-Honshu as early as 38 Ka ago. This island was separated by 30–40 km of water even during the LGM. Also, obsidian from Koshidake on Kyushu has been found in Paleolithic sites on southern Korea. Microblades produced on wedge-shaped cores appear to have traversed the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Peninsula and then crossed the Tsugaru Strait to reach western Honshu by the end of the Pleistocene. By the late Pleistocene people in Northeast Asia possessed the knowledge and the equipment to traverse stretches of water. However, the earliest direct evidence of canoes does not appear until about 5.5 Ka ago in the Torihama shell midden during the Early Jomon.
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Ikawa-Smith, F. (2022). Over the Water, Into and Out of the Japanese Archipelago, During the Pleistocene: Humans, Obsidian, and Lithic Techniques. In: Cassidy, J., Ponkratova, I., Fitzhugh, B. (eds) Maritime Prehistory of Northeast Asia. The Archaeology of Asia-Pacific Navigation, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1118-7_3
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