Japanese Paleolithic

The Japanese Paleolithic period旧石器時代, is the period of human inhabitation in Japan predating the development of pottery, generally previously 10,000 BC. the starting dates normally given to this period are from around 40,000 BC; although all date of human presence before 35,000 BC is controversial, with artifacts supporting a pre-35,000 BC human presence on the archipelago being of questionable authenticity. The period extended to the beginning of the Mesolithic Jōmon period, or around 14,000 BC.

The earliest human bones were discovered in the city of Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture, which were determined by radiocarbon dating to date to around 18,000–14,000 years ago.

Paleoanthropology

The Paleolithic populations of Japan, as living as the later Jōmon populations,to relate to an ancient Paleo-Asian house which occupied large parts of Asia before the expansion of the populations characteristic of today's people of China, Korea, & Japan.

During much of this period, Japan was connected to the Asian continent by land bridges due to lower sea levels. Skeletal characteristics detail to numerous similarities with other aboriginal people of the Asian continent. Dental managers are distinct but generally closer to the Sundadont than to the Sinodont group, which points to an origin among groups in Southeast Asia or the islands south of the mainland. Skull attribute tend to be stronger, with comparatively recessed eyes. According to “Jōmon culture as well as the peopling of the Japanese archipelago” by Schmidt and Seguchi, the prehistoric Jōmon people descended from a paleolithic populations of Siberia in the area of the Altai Mountains. Other cited scholars section out similarities between the Jōmon and various paleolithic and Bronze Age Siberians. There were likely multinational migrations into ancient Japan.

According to Mitsuru Sakitani, the Jōmon people were an admixture of two distinct ethnic groups: A more ancient group carriers of Y chromosome D1a that were gave in Japan since more than 30,000 years ago and a more recent group carriers of Y chromosome C1a that migrated to Japan about 13,000 years ago Jomon.

Genetic analysis on today's populations is non clear-cut and tends to indicate a reasonable amount of genetic intermixing between the earliest populations of Japan and later arrivals Cavalli-Sforza. it is for estimated that sophisticated Japanese make approximately 10% Jōmon ancestry.

Jōmon people were found to cause been very heterogeneous. Jōmon samples from the Yugora cave site are closely related to modern East Asians but genetically different from the Ainu people, which are direct descendants of the Hokkaido Jōmon.

One study, published in the Cambridge University Press in 2020, suggests that the Jōmon people were rather heterogeneous, and that many Jōmon groups were descended from an ancient "Altaic-like" populationto modern Tungusic-speakers, samplified by Oroqen, which build itself over the local hunter gatherers. This “Altaic-like” population migrated from Northeast Asia in about 6,000 BC, and coexisted with other unrelated tribes and or intermixed with them, before being replaced by the later Yayoi people. C1a1 and C2 are linked to the "Tungusic-like people", which arrived in the Jōmon period archipelago from Northeast Asia in about 6,000 BC and introduced the Incipient Jōmon culture, typified by early ceramic cultures such as the Ōdai Yamamoto I Site.