Population estimates by Koyama, 1978 and Koyama, 1984 for Japan as a whole indicate a population peak in Middle Jomon times, and continuing decline through Late and Final Jomon, speculatively related to broad-scale climatic change. Thus, throughout Korea, the Russian Far East, and Japan, Neolithic people were actively engineering their local ecologies and slowly growing in prosperity and numbers, but the rising curve of social complexity was far behind that generated in the China heartland. Anthropogenic effects were being created on landscapes of the Russian Far East and Japan by horticultural experimentation, but they were modest compared to what would

ultimately come to affect Japan as a result of accelerating sociopolitical developments PD0325901 in Korea, which would bring suddenly the full-blown cultivation of rice, millets, and other crops in conjunction with a major influx of population and new cultural elements (Rhee et al., 2007, Shin et

al., 2012 and Stark, 2006). As the higher-latitude developments just recounted continued over several millennia, Korean Chulmun Neolithic populations went on to expand the role of cultivation within their mix of broad-spectrum hunting, fishing, gathering, selleck and incipient cultivation practices. The biotically favorable circumstances of their region fostered an increasing prosperity in well-situated extended families. Leading “houses” began to engage their communities in the essential labor of producing Fludarabine manufacturer the infrastructure of dams, canals, and other facilities

needed for laborious but extremely profitable wet-rice cultivation on the Chinese model during the Bronze (Mumun) period. This led to the development of highly productive wet-rice economies in communities that also became increasingly socially differentiated due to variations in the relative wealth and power of different lineages. Successful communities of this new type were soon multiplying exponentially, continuously hiving off daughter settlements over generations as the Chulmun Neolithic morphed into the Mumun culture, and Mumun farming communities spread rapidly down the Korean Peninsula and then across the narrow Tsushima Strait into Japan. Although there are unmistakable signs of an emerging elite social stratum and growing cultural complexity in Early/Middle Jomon Japan, the Jomon population was heaviest and most highly organized in the north, while the southern end of the archipelago was much less populous and socio-politically incapable of major resistance in the crucial period around 3000 cal BP when Korean communities began to flow across the narrow Tsushima Strait into Late Jomon southern Japan (Rhee et al., 2007 and Shoda, 2010). There is effectively no evidence for combative resistance to this influx, but instead evidence of intermarriage between the Korean interlopers and Japanese indigenes.