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Close-Up: The Anthropology
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| Jomon Mariners |
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One day, during the Stone Age, when Ice Age glaciers were just receding, a small group of Jomon mariners left their homes in a temperate forest of Japan, pushed a primitive canoe to the water’s edge, and set out toward the Arctic. Eventually they crossed the Pacific, one of the most tempestuous oceans in the world. |
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| Kennewick Man |
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We know that they completed their journey because anthropologists have found the bones of Stone Age east Asians in muddy riverbanks and dry desert caves of North America.
This reconstruction shows an artist’s rendition of Kennewick Man, who died between 9,300 and 9,600 years ago in Eastern Washington.
Kennewick Man has a narrow face, more similar to the Jomon of Japan than to northeast Asians and the modern Amerindians.
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| Bering Sea Land Bridge Mammoth Hunters |
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An old paradigm stated that the first migrants to the Americas were Northeast Siberian mammoth hunters who walked across the Bering Land Bridge, trudged south across the massive glaciers that blanketed British Columbia, and then colonized North America.
But this hypothesis doesn’t explain the observed chronology precisely, nor does it explain how people found food during their long crossing of the barren glaciers. And finally, Kennewick Man was clearly not a northeast Siberian mammoth hunter, but a Jomon mariner.
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| The Jomon were Proven Mariners |
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Some of the earliest Stone Age skeletons in North America had an isotopic composition similar to that of dolphins, indicating that these people ate seafood primarily.
Fishnet fragments have been found in ancient North American settlements.
Anthropologists have dug up skeletons of Stone Age North Americans on islands off the coast of California and British Columbia.
The Jomon were proven mariners.
All of these observations indicate that early settlers to the Americas were sailors and fisherpeople.
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| Why did the Jomon People Migrate? |
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Why did Jomon with primitive stone tools leave their comfortable homes, with salmon in the rivers and deer in the forests – to paddle across the storm-tossed Arctic?
In the Wake of the Jomon argues that pragmatism, alone, wasn’t sufficient. People wandered north for romantic adventure or a spiritual quest.
If you accept this hypothesis, then you must ask:
Why has the uncompromising hand of evolution preserved such outlandish behavior in the gene pool?
By examining these questions, we begin to appreciate the adventurous spirit in all of us.
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