Posted on 04/13/2007 10:51:01 AM PDT by blam
04/13/2007
BY NOBUYUKI WATANABE, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
Humans may have trekked up a mountain 35,000 years ago in what is now Tochigi Prefecture to dig up raw obsidian ore to process into stone tools, archaeologists say.
Trapezoid stone tools unearthed on Mount Takaharayama in the prefecture will shed light on early human history in Japan, they added.
The tools indicate human beings at the start of the Upper Paleolithic Era (roughly 35,000 years ago) were already "mining" raw stones to produce tools, not just picking them up off the ground, the researchers said.
Previous finds had led experts to believe such mining started in the more recent Jomon Period, from 13,000 years to 3,000 years ago.
Archaeologists Takashi Tamura, 56, and Sadakatsu Kunitake, 31, first found the stone tools in 2005 on the 1,795-meter mountain straddling Yaita and other municipalities.
Tamura heads the Department of Historical Sciences at the Natural History Museum and Institute, Chiba, and Kunitake is a lecturer at Josai University in Saitama Prefecture.
A panel formed by the Yaita city board of education conducted a full-scale research dig at the mountain in October 2006.
The team collected 441 stone relics from valley cliffs around the ridges at about 1,400 meters.
Of the pieces found, eight are judged to be trapezoid stone tools used by early humans to cut, poke or shave other items.
Akira Ono, a professor of archaeology at Tokyo Metropolitan University, headed the panel. "Judging from their type, the processing and where they were found, these must be trapezoid tools" like ones typically found in loam layers in the Kanto region that date back 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, he said.
Obsidian, or volcanic glass, from the mountain contains many impurities. Each piece must first be broken open to see if it can be shaped into a tool.
The discovery indicates those who made the tools had developed the high intellect needed to check, screen and process the obsidian into tools on the spot, the researchers say.
Also, knowing where to find the obsidian in the vast Kanto plain, where there are few sources of ore, also indicates their intelligence, Tamura said.
"To understand and share such information, they had to use language," he said.
Experts note the tools were made around the time first modern homo sapiens began migrating from Africa, beginning about 50,000 years ago.
"Ingenuity is a major feature of modern humans," said Kenichi Shinoda, chief of the Division of Human Evolution at the National Science Museum, Tokyo. "The Takaharayama relics present images of such people."
Tsuyoshi Fujimoto, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of Tokyo, said the relics offer a "great possibility to shed light on" Japan's earliest inhabitants.(IHT/Asahi: April 13,2007)
"The immediate predecessors of the Ainu, who are the native people of northeastern Japan, occupied the site. Many archeologists consider the Ainu to be the last living descendants of the Jomon people, who lived throughout Japan from as early as 13,000 years ago."
I’m curious. Was Japan not an island at that time? If it was, how did the early inhabitants get there?
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The sign of the ancient marinerM. J. Morwood of the University of New England, New South Wales and colleagues discuss stone tools and bones of fossil elephants and other animals, buried between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago on Flores, in the Lesser Sunda island chain east of Java. When sea-level was at its lowest, during the last Ice Age, much of what is now Indonesia was joined up into a single landmass, which included Borneo, Java and Sumatra. Even then, Flores was separated by three deep-water channels, the narrowest 19 km wide. Suggestions that stone tools on Flores and elsewhere in offshore Indonesia could represent a very early phase of human navigational ability have usually met with disbelief. This age suggests that the makers of the tools were Homo erectus, because, as far as we know, there were no members of Homo sapiens in Asia at the time. Not only that, these creatures would have to have crossed the open sea not once, but three times. [And] in Germany 400,000-year-old wooden spears, perfectly shaped for throwing [were left by] people that lived long before modern humans or even Neanderthals came to northern Europe.
by Henry Gee
Don’t you just love the wild guesses they use to fit things into their predetermined theories?
It’s exactly what rationalizing I would do if I were a caveman, learn somehow to become a skilled geologist and bash a hole in the side of a mountain to find stones to make stone tools of other stones.
Figuring out how to get off the island to find animals to eat would have been a priority I would think. Not the type of stone used to bash it witrh.
35,000 years ago Japan was connected to the mainland, they walked.
40,000+ years ago, early humans got to Australia by boat.
Great stuff, obsidian. I remember watching someone back in college striking a microblade of it off of a levallois (sp?) core. If done right, you can almost get a molecular edge on it.
Don't you find it interesting that there were people around 35,000 years ago who were thinking a lot more rationally than you are capable of today?
In articles I have read on ancient flint and obscidian mining in other parts of the world, many of the specimen stones at the quarry sites are partially worked on site to produce suitable blanks and cores that were light enough to transport (in woven baskets/packs) but still large enough that more than one type of tool could be made from them. While the tools are stone and very sharp, they do wear and become dull. They are then reworked (by flaking off the dull edges) into smaller sharp tools for a different purpose, and when they become dull again, they are again reworked into yet a smaller form,etc.
The users of these tools had long since figured out the what, where, and how of getting plants and animals to eat. The site is really more about the early industry of finding and processing obscidian for use at other places or as a trading material to exchange with other hunter gatherer bands. The article notes contemporary finds of flaked stone tools out on the plains where these types of rocks do not occur. It seems they have found a site where they may have come from. Conclusive “proof’ will come if the stone tools from the plains can be shown to be geologically the same as the stones in the quarry.
When the ice melts they are islands. When the ice returns, the ocean levels drop and they become part of the mainland.
This facilitates the movement of animals and plants.
The group who developed these mines probably looked quite similar to our own ancestors of the same time period.
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