Did pots kickstart a 10,000 year society?
After the Stone Age came the Jomon Period, which lasted from 10,500 BC to 300 BC.
That’s 10,000 years.
That’s a longgg time!
On a scale of Asian to porn star, that’s firmly on the porn star end.
No really, let’s take a second.
Think back to 2000 years ago to when the Roman Empire was still around.
Those people were ANCIENT, right?
Well, that’s only one-SEVENTH of the Jomon time period.
To the people living at the end of the Jomon period, the people living in the beginning
were longgg gone and forgotten.
This brings us to a problem I have with our current calendar system.
We’re currently in the year 2017 because some time ago, people chose to start counting
from the year this dude named Jesus was born.
That became AD, and the years before became BC.
Well, there are some problems with this way of counting.
One. It’s Christian-centric.
The birth of Jesus is an important event for Christians, but people of other religions
don’t really care.
It’s like watching your kid perform in a school play, you don’t really give a cr-p
about the other little brats on stage.
Two.
We’re not REALLY sure that Jesus was born in 1 AD.
In fact, scholars tend to think that he was born on or before 4 BC.
Three.
Counting backwards, come onn!
Four.
There is no Year 0!
After 1 BC comes 1 AD.
This makes counting a little confusing.
For example, answer this.
Let’s say you’re born in the year 2 BC.
So at year 2 AD, how old would you be?
If you say 4...
then you’re STUPI--, no.
But you would actually be 3 years old.
Think about it.
Five.
This is the biggest problem, I think.
It gives you an inaccurate sense of human history.
We’re in the year 2017.
Like it or not, this places a mental shortcut in most people’s heads.
It makes you think that human civilization has been around for ABOUT that long, a few
thousand years.
Of course, you KNOW that people lived before year 1 AD, but you probably don’t have a
sense of how far back humans go.
That arbitrary line at 1 AD makes many people intuitively split up human history into two
halves.
Anything after year 1 is modern, and anything before is totally ancient.
But this is misleading because 2000 years is not half of human history at all!
So...is there a BETTER system to use?
Scientist Cesare Emiliani proposed a different starting point.
One 10,000 years prior.
What happened at this point?
It’s roughly when humans began to build settlements and transition out of a hunter-gatherer
lifestyle.
The beginning of humanity’s ascent, you could say.
That’s why we’ll call this new calendar the Human Era.
The beauty is that you wouldn’t have to change our current calendars much, just add
a 1 in front of the current year.
Right now, it is 2017 AD.
In the new scheme, it would be 12017 HE.
This resolves the nonsense of not having a year 0, and it starts SO far back that there
is rarely a need to count backwards.
It is significant to EVERYONE, except aliens.
More importantly, it gives you a sense of how long human civilization has lasted.
BACK...to the Jomon.
So how many people were living in Japan at the time?
Well, trying to calculate the population 10,000 years ago is like, trying to count the number
of people at a house party...but the house party happened 10,000 years ago.
It’s really hard, is what I’m saying, so take these numbers with a grain of salt.
According to smart people, in the early Jomon, there were about 20,000 people in the Japanese
archipelago.
The population peaked in the middle Jomon at about 260,000.
It then declined, and by the end of the Jomon period, it was 76,000 to 160,000.
Again, these are rough estimates, there’s no way to know for sure.
Kinda like McDonald’s burgers.
You’re pretty certain they’re not made from the flesh of children kidnapped by Ronald
McDonald, but there’s no way to know for sure.
Although the Jomon period covers 10,000 years, even if you pick two Jomon people separated
by a THOUSAND years, their lives were not that much different, compared to modern times.
This is because of the nature of technology.
Technology has an exponential effect on progress, as it BUILDS upon past technology.
Our MODERN society progresses so fast because we stand upon the shoulders of thousands of
societies that came before us.
In early cultures like the Jomon, as new inventions improve survivability, the population increases,
providing more brain power to come up with MORE inventions.
It’s a virtuous cycle.
It’s like when you’re a baby and you learn to crawl, then you build upon that to walk,
then run, then dance, and then you go to Dancing with the Stars, the epitome of the art of
dance.
There were two major inventions during the Jomon period that made life much easier: the
bow and arrow, and pottery.
Both seem to be local inventions, they were not introduced from outside.
The Late Jomon used bows about a meter long.
They can fire arrows about 50-60 meters away.
The arrows were small and could not have been that effective against large animals, although
they would’ve been annoying.
The woods back in those days were probably full of pissed off deer with arrows permanently
attached because they had no hands to pull them out.
This would have been ineffective, so scientists believe that the Jomon tipped their arrows
with poison from the root of the wolfsbane plant.
This poison is so deadly that half a gram could kill a small deer.
It is thought that the Roman Emperor Claudius was poisoned by wolfsbane.
Claudius married his niece, Agrippina.
By all accounts, she was ambitious, ruthless, and did not shy away from murder.
Think Cersei Lannister.
She convinced Claudius into naming her son Nero as his successor, then orchestrated Claudius’s
death by putting wolfsbane in his meal.
The poison causes vomiting and diarrhea.
Then your heart starts beating erratically.
And then you die.
Anyhoo, the oldest pottery in Japan was found around 11,000 to 10,000 BC.
Everyone sees the advantage of the bow, but don’t dismiss the importance of pottery.
It was revolutionary!
Imagine doing even simple tasks WITHOUT pottery.
Like...storing food.
Noooo!
Watering plants.
Noooo!
Cooking ramen.
Noooo!
Pottery allows you to live farther away from sources of water.
The Jomon used pots to boil plants to make them edible or taste better.
Usually when a society invents pottery, it means they have adopted a more agricultural
way of life.
You need containers to store the food that you harvest.
Hunter-gatherers would not be lugging around large and heavy pots, but a society that stays
in one place for long stretches of time would certainly find many uses for pottery.
Interestingly, although the Jomon did create pottery and stay in settlements, they did
NOT take up agriculture to any large degree.
The earliest pottery were quite simple, then became more elaborate over time.
Kinda like the lies that you tell your parents.
I didn’t eat it.
Dad, I can explain.
I never told you this, but I had a pet...ant.
His name is Ant.
And I loved him.
And he died the week right before the test
and I couldn’t study at ALL.
How did he die?
Murder.
What we know of how the Jomon lived came from stuff we found in their homes, burial sites,
and garbage heaps.
They lived in pit dwellings, which were basically round or rectangular holes dug in the ground
with a thatched roof.
They had indoor fireplaces, to cook inside and keep warm.
Scientists used to think that large settlements only formed if a society was able to support
them through farming.
A hunter-gatherer society could not switch to a sedentary lifestyle without farming.
The Jomon are kind of special in that they lived in long-term settlements, but did NOT
farm that much.
Scientists think that when the climate warmed up, more plants and nut-bearing trees appeared
and became major sources of food.
Many Jomon villages were created near these food sources, and they all had storage pits
to save the food that they gathered.
This was how these villages persisted without farming.
As more large villages formed, naturally some complex interactions developed.
Some villages began to specialize in what they hunted and gathered and began to trade
with other villages.
Some villages specialized in fish, others in deer meat.
Some specialized in water pokemon, others in fire pokemon.
They even found a huge village with 700 dwellings and large storehouses that seemed to be a
large Jomon trading center, where people from far away would come to trade.
Now, you may be tempted to romanticize Jomon life.
Oh, they’re living off the land, living in harmony with nature, shitting in the woods.
Not quite.
The earliest Jomon man ever found was 5 feet 4 inches.
His lower left teeth were worn down to the jawbone, likely due to biting on leather thongs
his whole life.
Not those, these.
Leather ropes.
His wisdom teeth were unused, meaning he didn’t grow that old.
This provided some evidence that the life expectancy of Jomon people was about 30 years
old.
X-rays of his bones revealed growth interruptions, meaning he must have nearly died several times
during childhood due to malnutrition.
It seems like life was nasty and dangerous.
The average person living now probably wouldn’t do so well.
Except me, of course, since I’m an expert with tools and my hands.
Society was probably surprisingly peaceful.
A study of Jomon skeletons revealed that the rate of violent deaths was tiny, much lower
than in other parts of the world.
They also tried to find instances of battle or warfare by looking for skeletons that died
violently all in one place, and could not find any case of this happening.
There’s a debate among archaeologists about warfare.
One side claims that violence and warfare is just part of human nature.
The other side claims that warfare is a result of agriculture and groups settling down in
one place.
Amassing resources leads to inequality and war.
The fact that Jomon culture was so peaceful seems to tell us that warfare is not a part
of human nature after all, which is a comforting thought.
Then again, knowing that we’ve been starting wars for thousands of years DUE to agriculture
is NOT so comforting.
If owning THINGS leads to conflict and violence, perhaps we should stop obsessing about that
new phone or buying a better car than our neighbor, and focus on fostering the relationships
we have with others.
Don’t be a dick, is what I’m saying.
That’s it for the Jomon.
See ya.