Talk:Japanese Paleolithic

Genetic Classification of Ainu

Removed the section that stated that the Ainu resembles Caucasoid. Not only do they in no way resemble Caucasoid (they do not resemble Caucasoids in skin tone, facial structure, etc) - but genetically, they are similar to proto-Australoids and Polynesians of South East Asia and Australia. Intranetusa (talk) 04:00, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

It didn't state this as current fact, it stated that it used to be believed, which is true and notable. OTOH, if you want to add resemblance to Australoids, you need to have a reference for this. --JWB (talk) 07:06, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Earliest hominids in Japan?

in the jomon article it says that the accepted earliest time for hominid inhabitation of japan is 200,000 BC, but this article suggests 500,000. Is it a typo in this article (should be 50,000) or in the other one (should be 500,000) ?? --Ignignot 00:51, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

There are many finds for the 200,000 BCE date, and it is the most strongly supported by archeologists. The 500,000 BCE date only corresponds to one site to this day, and therefore is less solidly established. I will try to reflect this in the wording. PHG 10:46, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The dating is still valid after the Fujimura Shinichi scandal?--Countakeshi 00:04, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Maybe no. Japanese Paleolithic may be dated back to around 100,000~150,000BCE. Please someone translate ja:旧石器捏造事件.#218.229.2.9

Partly prompted by Elvenscout :), I am now in the process of translating the Japanese page linked above about a hoax involving Japanese paleolithic sites. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 22:41, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

serious gaps here

There was a major scandal some years ago involving an amateur archeologist by the name of Fujimura Shinichi. Article Japanese Paleolithic Hoax right on the Wiki site covers this. The relevant dates and assertions in this article are either seriously misdated or just simply not true. The section on tools saying that the earliest stone tools ever were made in Japan is completely wrong. The manufacture of stone tools is well over a million years old and human occupation of Japan is nowhere near that old. Miami University is typical of many websites that make note of this *[1]. Another is Australian ABC at *[2] and the University of Southampton. *[3]. Placing evidence of human habitation in Japan back 100k years needs real citations. These are serious credibility problems for Wikipedia.

--Malangthon 09:25, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

The extent of Fujimura's damage may extend to at least 180 sites in which he was involved. See the wiki entry on Shinichi Fujimura and link to Yamada Shoh's artcle wherein he states:

"Fujimura’s confession in the fall of 2001 confirmed that his forgery had begun as early as 1980 and involved 42 sites. It is possible that most of the sites with which he was involved in his long career – over 180 in all – were affected by his forgery."

What percentage of the whole for Japan is not clear. Fujimura's "evidence" however formed the basis of the 600K year old dating and renders this dating utterly false.

Malangthon 13:38 EPT 13 Oct., 2006

citations

In the section that says "..., the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper planted a camera at an archaeological site and captured video of Fujimura planting artifacts at the Kamitakamori site in 2000. 90% of Paleolithic work in Japan was attributed to Fujimura, and the discovery of the hoax thus put serious doubt on the chronology of ancient man in Japan[citation needed]..."

The 'citation needed' insert should be removed. The growing body of evidence in the field of archeology and in Japan is very clear, the entire time line is now in doubt and until this all settles, there are a lot of peole who are still recovering from the hoax. I have added a number of resources in the references section in the Fujimura article. If nothing else, many of them could be copied over here

Malangthon 18:22 EPT 13 Oct., 2006

From what I have read on the subject, at least the "90% of Paleolithic work in Japan is attributed to Fujimura" is both incredible and inexact. And as far as I know, Fujimura had been most active on pre-100.000 BCE findings, and this is precisely the chronological segment where previous claims have been put in doubt. Maybe the sentence could be more balanced, and these numerical facts checked and referenced should they be true. The whole segment seems a bit polemical and needlessly POV. Regards PHG 06:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Ground tools and polished tools

No citation has been given for the statement that Japanese tools are unique and are the first of the ground stone tools anywhere on the planet. If no one can substantiate this, it needs to be removed. I have written a number of archeologists over the past few months and am getting no confirmation on this statement.

Malangthon 13:54 EPT 13 Oct. 2006

This statement is in "Prehistoric Japan, New perspectives on insular East Asia", Keiji Imamura, University of Hawai Press, Honolulu, ISBN 0-8248-1853-9. Regards PHG 05:16, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Response: Fair enough. However, this is more of the same that brought about the Fujimura scandal and reeks of Nihonronism. It is arguably just one more instance wherein the entire thrust is to place the mythical Japanese race at a distance from the rest of humanity. Imamura Keiji has references to back this up, yes? I press the point because this is convenient "truth" on the well tred path of Japanese psychomythology and needs to be correlated.

Malangthon 06:28, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

There is no reason why Paleolithic people could NOT have used ground stone tools; the technique is way simpler and easier to master than any form of chipping and particularly the direct percussion Levallois technique used by the Neanderthals(!). Late Paleolithic blade techniques maximized edge sharpness and raw material use efficiency to a degree unobtainable by grinding. The fact that grinding usually only appears in the Mesolithic or Neolithic does not make it more "advanced" than chipping, the different methods of which require extensive training and skill -- in fact, in terms of work time per inch of edge, grinding is massively more inefficient than chipping. In many cases the reason for grinding has been the absence of fine-grained, non-directional stone suitable for chipping or the need for special-purpose tools such as axes that need to be made of a stone that is better resistant to shattering but is coarse-grained or directional. If special circumstances in Paleolithic Japan were conductive to the adoption of ground stone axes, this is no reason to postulate that the inhabitants were in any way more "advanced" or "intelligent" than their mainland neighbours. When the Paleolithic and Neolithic (and later the Mesolithic) were defined in the 19th century based on Central European archaeology, a number of material criteria were suggested for identifying them. These included chipped vs. ground stone, pottery, and agriculture. However, these are not universally applicable criteria; for instance, chipping has continued in many places up to the historical period and even to the present day and has been used parallel with grinding, pottery appeared thousands of years ago in certain areas (e.g., Siberia and Alaska) where no actual agriculture has spread to this day, etc.. The evolutionist doctrine that certain inventions appear only during certain fixed phases of cultural evolution has been debunked more than a hundred years ago. PS. To my knowledge, no ground stone tools are known from the European, African or mainland Asian Paleolithic and I would suggest that Malangthon present evidence to the contrary before demanding the removal of the statement. Reading the article to the end should make it clear that there is no "mythical Japanese race" going back to the Paleolithic but a series of immigrations from various directions.--Death Bredon (talk) 20:26, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Interwiki links

Hello all --

Elvenscout742 edited out the interwiki link to ja that I'd added to the Japanese rendering of the phrase "Japanese paleolithic age", i.e. 日本の旧石器時代, stating in their edit comment that "that's not the place for interWiki links." Would someone be so kind as to explain then where is the correct place? My thought in adding the link is that if someone wants to see the Japanese version of this article, they can click directly on the Japanese text right here from the en article. Otherwise they'd have to copy and paste into the ja wiki's search box in a separate browser window, which is somewhat less than convenient.

Does linking the Japanese text to the ja wiki violate some base Wikipedia policy? Does it get in anyone's way? Does it offend anyone? If so, by all means please state your case -- my ears are open.  :) In the meantime, I'm adding the link back, as I find it most helpful when comparing the en and ja content.

Thank you, Eiríkr Útlendi 22:44, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure about policy, but it certainly seems to violate a commonly accepted convention. The inter-wiki links are on the left-had side of the page. People who want to see pages on other language Wikipedias use those. Generally, one should not add links to other language Wikipedias in the main text of the article. You would not get away with this on, say, Junichiro Koizumi. Also, there is a template for this now, anyway. elvenscout742 15:32, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for responding, Elvenscout. Could you point me to the template? Also, what of words in Japanese included in the main text of an article, but that are not the title of the article? Is there also a kibbosh on interwiki linking using such words (say, for example, Japanese_language#Official_status)? Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 15:58, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

I used the template in my recent edit here. I think it should probably be used on all those other Japanese history articles, too. I personally think that if a subject has a Japanese Wikipedia article, it should have an English one, too, so there should never be any need to link to Japanese Wikipedia in the body of an article. elvenscout742 16:14, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough, thanks, Elvenscout. I'll keep an eye open for any J-only articles in need of translation.  :) Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 16:44, 8 March 2006 (UTC) -- PS - thanks too for explaining the convention of the interwiki links on the left, which had previously completely escaped my notice. Doh!

Japanese paleolithic hoax

Hey there folks --

I'm about halfway through translating ja:旧石器捏造事件 into English, and in checking my facts and making sure everything makes sense, I think I've stumbled across an error here in this Japanese_Paleolithic#Japanese_archeology_of_the_Paleolithic_period section. To wit, the article text states:

90% of Paleolithic work in Japan was attributed to Fujimari and thus put serious doubt on the chronology of ancient man in Japan.

Grammar and spelling aside, it looks like this 90% figure is mistakenly interpreted. The closest I get in the Japanese article about the hoax is the following:

実際「発見」された遺物の殆ど9割方は、まさに彼自身の手によって表面採集されたり発掘されたものであり、他人の手によって発掘されたものは、彼があらかじめ仕込んで置いたものだとされている。

In fact, as much as 90% of the "discoveries" were dug up by Fujimura himself, while artifacts dug up by others are thought to have been planted by him beforehand.

So it's apparently not 90% of all paleolithic work in Japan. I'll dig around elsewhere online and see what I can find about this. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 18:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

This page (Japanese only) indicates that roughly 85% of paleolithic finds in Miyagi Prefecture that Fujimura was involved in were bogus. Specifically, there were 148 sites in the prefecture that Fujimura was connected with, of which only 19 were found to actually be paleolithic, with the remaining 129 showing no paleolithic evidence. Still not so sure about the 90% of [all] Paleolithic work in Japan claim, but I'll keep looking. This other page on the Japanese Archaeological Association site looks promising... Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 18:49, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm still not entirely sold on the 90% figure, but then I haven't been able to devote much time to looking into it at present. I've added a {{cite-needed}} flag to that sentence for the time being.

I've also finished translating the ja:旧石器捏造事件 page, the English for which now resides at Japanese Paleolithic Hoax. Comments and edits are welcome. Have a look at the Talk page as well. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 23:17, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Dating style

I noticed that someone had tried to swap the dating style from BC/AD to BCE/CE - but I don't see that they tried to get consensus for it on the talk page. So I am putting it back the way it was, especially as the history template now uses BC/AD. John Smith's (talk) 21:44, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Again an anon-user has unilaterally changed the dating style. If people wish to make a case for something other than BC/AD they should do so here, or at the very least explain it. Furthermore the edit was only partial - the rest of the article still used BC/AD. Thus I have restored the previous style. John Smith's (talk) 20:11, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

When the article was created, it used an inconsistent style because of the included infobox. Since the infobox is present on other pages involving Japan, this article should probably follow that style and stick to BC/AD. I noticed a recent change made the article match the infobox, so it should probably stay that way unless the infobox changes too. Iridescence talk • contrib 09:36, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Japanese paleolithic tools

http://books.google.com/books?id=e75T03MIp3sC&pg=PA269&dq=Moro+japanese+knife&hl=en&sa=X&ei=O6vUUIu4Banr0QHqgoGwBQ&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Moro%20japanese%20knife&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&pg=PA263&dq=Moro+japanese+knife&hl=en&sa=X&ei=O6vUUIu4Banr0QHqgoGwBQ&ved=0CEgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Moro%20japanese%20knife&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=7qEoAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA133&dq=Moro+japanese+knife&hl=en&sa=X&ei=O6vUUIu4Banr0QHqgoGwBQ&ved=0CF4Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=Moro%20japanese%20knife&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 18:36, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Hello?

Before I waste time, is anyone still watching this page? (2602:302:D13C:6BF0:A56C:B049:C529:64A6 (talk) 20:06, 24 August 2015 (UTC))

--Yep, that's what I thought. It's a ghost town like most of wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:302:D13C:6BF0:A56C:B049:C529:64A6 (talk) 08:29, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

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Removed unsourced climate claims

I have removed some climate claims that I could not reconcile with other sources. The text I removed states: "[...] although the period is associated with a warmer climate worldwide (30,000–20,000 before present), and the islands may have particularly benefited from it." The citation provided on that line does not discuss the climate during this time. In fact, the statement appears to be completely untrue as the period stated is during the Last Glacial Maximum; the worldwide climate would have been colder, not warmer. If I have missed something, feel free to revert but please provide a citation. Iridescence talk • contrib 09:32, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Hist401

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 January 2023 and 8 May 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): RekishiKyoushi (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by RekishiKyoushi (talk) 19:25, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

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