Marcus Tay's List: Human History

• In Japan there are three dates on   the container: there's the date when the milk was manufactured, and   there's the date when the milk arrived at the supermarket, and then   there's the date when the milk should be thrown away, and these dates   are in big letters; the Japanese really care about the dates.
• The Japanese government obstructs the import of foreign processed food   by slapping on a ten-day quarantine.

• Incredibly, though, archeological investigations have shown one other   thing: during those 10,000 years of isolation, the Tasmanians actually   lost some technologies that they had carried from the Australian mainland   to Tasmania.

  • isolation of Tasmania island actually caused them to lose some technologies
• Flinders Island was even more extreme — that   tiny society of 200 people on Flinders Island went extinct several millenia   ago. Evidently, there is something about a small, totally isolated human   society that causes either very slow innovation or else actual loss   of existing inventions. That result applies not just to Tasmania and   Flinders, but to other very isolated human societies. There are other   examples. The Torres Strait islanders between Australia and New Guinea   abandoned canoes. Most Polynesian societies lost bows and arrows, and   lost pottery. The Polar Eskimos lost the kayak, Dorset Eskimos lost   dogs and bow drills, and Japan lost guns.

  • Examples of societies who lost technologies as they were isolated

• German beer drinkers are fiercely loyal to their local brand of beer. And so  there is no national brand of beer in Germany, analogous to Budweiser or Miller  or Coors in the United States
• German local tastes and German government policies.
• most German beer is   consumed within 30 miles of the place where it is brewed.

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• China's experience   of technological innovation came during the times when China's unity   fell apart, or when China was taken over temporarily by an outside invader.
• Twenty years ago, a   few idiots in control of the world's most populous nation were able   to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time   of the Great Cultural Revolution,
• Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better?
• India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not  technologically as innovative as Europe.
• there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified  society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage.
• innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some intermediate degree of  fragmentation.

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• The essence of these events is that Europe was fragmented, so Columbus had many  different chances.
• geography. Just picture a map of China and a map of   Europe. China has a smooth coastline. Europe has an indented coastline,   and each big indentation is a peninsula that became an independent country,   independent ethnic group, and independent experiment in building a society:   notably, the Greek peninsula, Italy, the Iberian peninsula, Denmark,   and Norway/Sweden. Europe had two big islands that became important   independent societies, Britain and Ireland, while China had no island   big enough to become an independent society until the modern emergence   of Taiwan. Europe is transected by mountain ranges that split up Europe   into different principalities: the Alps, the Pyrenees, Carpathians —   China does not have mountain ranges that transect China. In Europe big   rivers flow radially — the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, and the   Elbe — and they don't unify Europe. In China the two big rivers   flow parallel to each other, are separated by low-lying land, and were   quickly connected by canals. For those geographic reasons, China was   unified in 221 B.C. and has stayed unified most of the time since then,   whereas for geographic reasons Europe was never unified.

  • Lovely analysis why Europe can never be unified
• why was China chronically unified, and why was Europe chronically disunified?  Why is Europe disunified to this day?

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• A Japanese nobleman   happened to be there, was very impressed, bought these two guns for   $10,000, and had his sword-maker imitate them. Within a decade, Japan   had more guns per capita than any other country in the world, and by   the year 1600 Japan had the best guns of any country in the world. And   then, over the course of the next century, Japan gradually abandoned   guns.

  • Japanese used to have the most numbr of guns in the world
• First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come  in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And  secondly, any society undergoes local fads
• By fads I mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either  adopt practices that are not profitable or for whatever reasons abandon  practices that are profitable

  • Most innovations comes from outsidet the society
• In short, competition between human   societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention   of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only   in an isolated society, where there's no competition and no source of   reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of   a valuable technology.

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• optimal fragmentation principle.
• technology   in medieval Confucian China. China led the world in innovation and technology   in the early Renaissance. Chinese inventions include canal lock gates,   cast iron, compasses, deep drilling, gun powder, kites, paper, porcelain,   printing, stern-post rudders, and wheelbarrows — all of those innovations   are Chinese innovations.

  • Example to show why Confucian China dos not suppress innovation
• The difference, though, is   that this abandoning of fleets in China was final, because China was   unified under one emperor. When that one emperor gave the order to dismantle   the shipyards and stop sending out the ships, that order applied to   all of China, and China's tradition of building ocean-going ships was   lost because of the decision by one person.

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• Japanese people are biologically undistinctive, being very similar in appearance and genes to other East Asians, especially to Koreans. As the Japanese like to stress, they are culturally and biologically rather homogeneous, with the exception of a distinctive people called the Ainu on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Taken together, these facts seem to suggest that the Japanese reached Japan only recently from the Asian mainland, too recently to have evolved differences from their mainland cousins, and displaced the Ainu, who represent the original inhabitants.

  • Appearance and biological studies seems to indicate Japanese came from the Asian mainland and displaced the indigenous people of Ainu
• Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language, just as English is obviously closely related to other Germanic languages

  • However, their language don't display the expected closeness to mainland language
• To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.
• far more isolated
• Climate, too, sets Japan apart. Its rainfall, up to 120 inches a year, makes it the wettest temperate country in the world.
• For prehistoric humans, the deciduous leafy forest was the most productive, providing abundant edible nuts such as walnuts, chestnuts, horse chestnuts, acorns, and beechnuts. Japanese waters are also outstandingly productive
• high productivity was a key to Japan’s prehistory
• Until the late nineteenth century, Hokkaido and northern Honshu were inhabited mainly by the Ainu, who lived as hunter-gatherers with limited agriculture, while the people we know today as Japanese occupied the rest of the main islands
• languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged.

  • Studying the Japanese language, tell us how long has the people seperated from other cultures
• Japanese and Korean parted company at least 4,000 years ago. As for the Ainu language, its origins are thoroughly in doubt; it may not have any special relationship to Japanese.
• preserved likenesses of Japan’s inhabitants are statues called haniwa, erected outside tombs around 1,500 years ago. Those statues unmistakably depict East Asians. They do not resemble the heavily bearded Ainu
• seas that surround much of Japan and coastal East Asia are shallow enough to have been dry land during the ice ages, when much of the ocean water was locked up in glaciers and sea level lay at about 500 feet below its present measurement. Land bridges connected Japan’s main islands to one another, to the Russian mainland, and to South Korea.

  • Low sea level allowed migration of humans from Asian Mainland to Japan
• usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago

  • Japan made the world oldest pottery
• watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to us
• eafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer

  • The amazing contribution by having pottery:
    = certain vege and seafood can be eaten
    = Small children can be given softboiled food, earlier weaning, closely spaced babies
    = Keep the toothless old folks alive
• Japanese potters were clearly hunter-gatherers, which also violated established views. Usually only sedentary societies own pottery

  • Why Japan developed pottery is astounding because only sedentary society had use for pottery, not hunter gathering society
• But the Japanese environment is so productive that people could settle down and make pottery while still living by hunting and gathering. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers exploit their environment’s rich food resources more than 10,000 years before intensive agriculture reached Japan.
• Pottery’s northward spread followed that of deciduous forest rich in nuts, suggesting that the climate-related food explosion was what permitted sedentary living.
• All these tantalizing clues make it likely that Jomon people were starting to practice some slash-and-burn agriculture, but evidently in a casual way that made only a minor contribution to their diet.

  • Agriculture only played a small role in early Japanese society.
• Their stay-at-home lifestyle was made possible by the diversity of resource-rich habitats available within a short distance of one central site: inland forests, rivers, seashores, bays, and open oceans.
• The estimate of the total population of Jomon Japan at its peak is 250,000—trivial, of course, compared with today, but impressive for hunter-gatherers.
• Throughout human history, centralized states with metal weapons and armies supported by dense agricultural populations have consistently swept away sparser populations of hunter-gatherers. How did Jomon Japan survive so long?
• until 400 b.c., the Korea Strait separated not rich farmers from poor hunter-gatherers, but poor farmers from rich hunter-gatherers
• China itself and Jomon Japan were probably not in direct contact. Instead Japan’s trade contacts, such as they were, involved Korea.

  • Although China had a flourishing agricultural society, it did not have direct links with Japan. Korea did. But Korea had poor farmers as compared to Japan rich hunter gathering society, hence there was no invasion from Korea( farmers) to Japan( hunter gathering ) as was the norm.
• Around 400 b.c., a new lifestyle arrived from South Korea.
• north coast of Japan’s southwesternmost island, Kyushu, just across the Korea Strait from South Korea
• Japan’s first metal tools, of iron, and Japan’s first undisputed full-scale agriculture

  • Korea farming society is finally spreading its influence to japan around 400BC
• Yayoi Japan to show the first signs of social stratification, as reflected especially in cemeteries

  • Farming allows stratification of society
• Japan’s first chronicle in a.d. 712, Japan emerged into the full light of history. As of 712, the people inhabiting Japan were at last unquestionably Japanese, and their language (termed Old Japanese) was unquestionably ancestral to modern Japanese.

  • The Japanese people that we know finally came about in AD712
• contrast between Jomon stability (or conservatism) and radical Yayoi change is the most striking feature of Japanese history
• One theory is that Jomon hunter-gatherers themselves gradually evolved into the modern Japanese. Because they had already been living a settled existence in villages for thousands of years, they may have been preadapted to accepting agriculture.
• Yayoi transition represents a massive influx of immigrants from Korea, carrying Korean farming practices, culture, and genes. Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice
• Instead, highly productive agriculture may have enabled a modest number of immigrant rice farmers to reproduce much faster than Jomon hunter-gatherers and eventually to outnumber them.
• similar transitions elsewhere in the world, the second or third theory seems to me more plausible than the first theory.
• In modern times European farmers thereby replaced native Californian hunters, aboriginal Australians, and the San people of South Africa. Farmers who used stone tools similarly replaced hunters prehistorically throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia.
• Jomon and Yayoi skeletons, researchers find, are on the average readily distinguishable. Jomon people tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography, with strikingly raised browridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat browridges and noses

  • The skeleton remains of Japanese in the Jomon and Yayoi period show distinct differences, suggesting that they are different groups of people and not that one evolved from the other.
• all these respects, Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese.
• geneticists attempting to calculate the relative contributions of Korean-like Yayoi genes and Ainu-like Jomon genes to the modern Japanese gene pool have concluded that the Yayoi contribution was generally dominant

  • Yayoi Period contribute most of the genes in the gene pool of modern Japanese
• hus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese,
• Genetic studies of the past three years have also at last resolved the controversy about the origins of the Ainu: they are the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.
• armers began raising rice in irrigated fields instead of in less productive dry fields; they developed rice strains that would grow well in a cool climate; their population expanded in Korea, putting pressure on Koreans to emigrate; and they invented iron tools that allowed them to mass-produce the wooden shovels, hoes, and other tools needed for rice-paddy agriculture.

  • reasons why finally the Korea farming community spill over to Japan
• If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar.
• if the Japanese people arose recently from some mixture, on the island of Kyushu, of original Ainu-like Jomon inhabitants with Yayoi invaders from Korea, the Japanese language might show close affinities to both the Korean and Ainu languages.

  • However, the language distinctiveness of the Japanese gives very different evidence to that provided by genetics physical anthropology
• From the southern tip of Kyushu to the northern tip of Hokkaido, the Japanese archipelago is nearly 1,500 miles long. In Jomon times it supported great regional diversity of subsistence techniques and of pottery styles and was never unified politically. During the 10,000 years of Jomon occupation, Jomon people would have evolved correspondingly great linguistic diversity. In fact, many Japanese place-names on Hokkaido and northern Honshu include the Ainu words for river, nai or betsu, and for cape, shiri, but such Ainu-like names do not occur farther south in Japan

  • Japan over 1500miles long, already had great language diversity before the Koreas came over in the Yoshi period
• The Korean language that reached Japan in 400 b.c., and that evolved into modern Japanese, I suspect, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modern Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.

  • Even the Korea people who reach Japan did not have a unified language ( Korea was ruled by 3 different kingdoms). Hence modern Korea and Japanese language are very different.

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