I was struck by this passage from Nicholas Wade’s “Before the Dawn”: “In Japan, for example, people lived as hunter-gatherers until around 250 BC when the cultivation of dry rice was introduced. Foraging and dry rice farming existed side by side until AD 300 when wet rice began to be cultivated. This required large scale irrigation, and at the same period the first chiefdoms and archaic states emerged”. As an ignorant round-eye, I am prone to conflating China & Japan and recalled how old China’s agricultural civilization is (though I forget if it’s older than Egypt). If the Japanese were barbarians for so long it’s surprising the Chinese didn’t conquer them.
Another surprising bit was his discussion of gracilization (trend toward lighter, more fragile bones, particularly the skull). I already knew that aborigines have retained the thick skulls of our ancestors (as apparently did the Fuegians), but I was surprised that Euros are behind the curve. “Gracilization is farthest advanced in sub-Saharan Africans and Asians, with Europeans still in some instances showing large size and robusticity”. A violation of Rushton’s Rule, not an unprecedented occurrence.
I didn’t read any more of Wade after getting off the train, but I did read John Hewetson’s introduction to Mutual Aid and was amused by the many contradictions between the books. Wade cites Keeley & Le Blanc on the constant violence & warfare among primitive peoples, not just primitive agriculturalists but also hunter-gatherers (and Wrangham on the violence of chimpanzees). Hewetson amusingly refers to to the warring primitive agriculturalists as “degenerated remnants of more advanced cultures of the past”, which don’t think would be popular among the cultural relativist anthropologists of today. Robert Edgerton might agree with the sentiment, though the language sounds more like Lovecraft. It’s also amusing when Hewetson points out how debunked Malthus is by the expansion on wealth starting near Malthus’ own time and in Hewetson’s era culminating in the vast destruction of foodstuff’s while many go hungry. If only he knew of the horrors capitalism had in store for the future. Another interesting fact noted is that Malthus’ Darwin-inspiring tract was written in response to William Godwin. Oddly enough, despite Hewetson writing his introduction in 1987, there is no mention of Dawkins’ attack on “propagation of the species” reasoning or sociobiology more generally.
July 11, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Jared Diamond has the definitive take on early Japanese history, here:
http://www2.gol.com/users/hsmr/Content/East%20Asia/Japan/History/roots.html
In short: the japanese were colonized (by the Koreans).
May 16, 2019 at 10:38 am
The link to the Jared Diamond essay is dead. I dunno that I would be so categorical as to call it definitive, but here’s a live link–to the original source, to boot. [http://discovermagazine.com/1998/jun/japaneseroots1455]
July 11, 2010 at 9:03 pm
> If the Japanese were barbarians for so long it’s surprising the Chinese didn’t conquer them.
They did try, when their expansion began reaching that far. Didn’t work so well.
Remember, present-day China is absolutely enormous, and is a major challenge to the Communist Party to keep unified. Why do you think they talk so much about ‘splittists’? And this is with all the benefits of technology and development. Imagine how much of a challenge keeping China going was in the BCs and low ADs where you seem to expect China to colonize Japan. They could only do it because China was much smaller then. Like most nations (France, Russia, USA come to mind as well documented examples of very small nations slowly growing to enormous extents), China has grown. They couldn’t conquer Japan early on because it was so very far away and there were closer places to develop first.
July 12, 2010 at 3:50 am
“Another surprising bit was his discussion of gracilization (trend toward lighter, more fragile bones, particularly the skull). I already knew that aborigines have retained the thick skulls of our ancestors…”.
Did you mean Australian aborigines? If so, you have your facts wrong. Archaeology has shown that the earliest inhabitants were in fact more gracile and were displaced by a later, more robust form. (That, the geographical distribution of languages and dogs, and changes in style of art all show that the Australian aborigines are not in fact the descendants of the original inhabitants after all – but it is politically correct to attribute that status to them.)
July 12, 2010 at 4:58 am
Jared Diamond has got this wrong: “But rice had been domesticated in warm southern China and spread only slowly northward to much cooler Korea, because it took a long time to develop cold-resistant strains of rice”.
In fact, rice was domesticated in India, and spread to China via central Asia – first north west, then north, then east. Cold climate strains could have developed almost anywhere along the route, even in India at higher altitudes. Wet rice farming doesn’t absolutely require massive irrigation works, at any rate in all locations and as a preliminary. In fact, common practice in places like Borneo was to get started with hill (dry) rice, then gradually prepare fields that could be flooded until over the years there was a lot like that. The wild ancestors of rice evolved to cope with occasionally being flooded in nature (the roots are supplied with oxygen through a snorkel system in the stems), so clearly those conditions could arise without preparation.
July 13, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Do you have a source? Wiki is a little ambiguous. Could it just have been independently derived?
July 13, 2010 at 9:02 pm
I can’t be specific, but many years ago I read it in one of the science magazines like Scientific American, American Scientist or New Scientist. Studies have been made of the genetics of various strains of rice showing which derived from which, and also archaeology shows that Indian rice cultivation started out with methods like ox drawn ploughs used for other grain crops like wheat rather than going straight to rice optimised methods as was done elsewhere. Of course, rice reached Japan from China and Korea, but the point is that cold climate strains may not actually have been developed in the latter.
This same research showed that rice growing in the USA started out on the back of seed from Madagascar, incidentally.
July 12, 2010 at 9:04 pm
One of the “recent human evolution” papers — the Wang et al one, I’m pretty sure — shows that there are dozens (I believe) of genes that are sweeping only in the Chinese or only in the Japanese.
So even geographically close races are have been diverging genetically within recorded history, and this due to natural selection rather than just drift.
July 12, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Thanks a boatload for the Jared Diamond link, Thorfinn. I found it very informative.
gwern, yes I believe the “kamikaze” in a military context referred originally to winds that sunk the Chinese fleet. That or Encarta lied to me.
P. M. Lawrence, I did not know that about Australians. Wade discusses just that sort of politically incorrect subject matter in the context of other indigenous peoples though.