Anthropological Study of the Transition from the Jomon to the Yayoi Periods in the Northern Kyushu Using Morphological and Paleodemographical Features (2)

Abstract

One of unsolved main problems in the study on the origin of Japanese is the transition from the Jomon people to the Yayoi people, especially the early stage of immigration in northern Kyushu. The main difficulty to solve this problem has been the lack of skeletal materials that belong to the time between the final Jomon and the early Yayoi Periods. Therefore, we know few details of the transition period. It is important, however, to know who carried out a drastic change of the Yayoi culture during this transitional period, i.e. the native Jomon people or the immigrant people. In a series of papers (Nakahashi and Iizuka, 1998; Iizuka and Nakahashi, 2002), we examined the interpretation which views the immigrant people as mainly responsible for the formation of the Yayoi society in northern Kyushu by introducing population genetic models. Recently, results of new AMS C14 dating show that the beginning of the Yayoi Period may go back to the 1000 B.C.. Then the length of the transition period (from the beginning of the Yayoi Period to the middle Yayoi Period) may be much longer than the values that we used in the previous studies (200~300 years). In this paper, we reconsider the problem using newly proposed values of the length of the transition period (at most 800 years). It is shown that the longer the length of the transition period, the more the view is compatible with results from anthropological and archeological studies. This implies that the immigrant people were mainly responsible for the drastic cultural change during the transitional period.