Glossary

Chulmun A Postglacial hunter-gatherer and agricultural culture of the Korean peninsula.

Holocene Period of time between the present and 10 000 years before present.

Hunter-gatherer A member of a people subsisting on food obtained by hunting and foraging.

Jomon Late glacial and postglacial culture of hunting and gathering in Japan (14 500 to 400BC).

Microliths Small stone flakes, normally used as part of a larger tool such as a sickle.

Since the end of the Pleistocene, East Asia has been a world with China at its center. Two major developments in China had profound affects on the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of East Asia and surrounding regions. These developments were the emergence of farming societies at the beginning of the Holocene and then the rise of states and Chinese dynastic civilization after 2000 BC.

Agriculture began initially along the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers by about 10 000 years ago, but quickly expanded across much of central China. For many scholars of China, the history of Chinese civilization begins with these early agricultural societies and their gradual evolution into the ancient Shang state of the second millennium BC. For this reason, there has been comparatively little research on hunter-gatherer populations in China during the Holocene. Hunter-gatherers were, however, present in the northern and southern peripheries of China up until recent times. These ‘peripheral’ areas, also comprising modern Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East, provide the main evidence for East Asian hunter-gatherers during the Early Holocene.

During the Pleistocene, large areas of East and Southeast Asia that are now under the ocean were exposed by lowered sea levels. As well as the huge Sunda shelf that connected mainland and island Southeast Asia, the present Yellow Sea between northeast China and the Korean Peninsula would also have been dry land. The Late Pleistocene archaeology of East Asia is characterized by a widespread microlithic technology that is thought to have been used in hunting large and medium-sized mammals. With the onset of a warmer climate in the Holocene, however, micro-liths disappeared in most regions and human populations seem to have shifted to a broader spectrum subsistence pattern that included a range of fish, shellfish, and plants. Early Holocene coastal foraging became most developed in the Chulmun and Jomon cultures of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Islands, respectively (see Asia, East: Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers).

Ceramic containers were developed very early in East Asia. Pottery is known from sites of the terminal Pleistocene in Japan, China, and the Russian Far East. At present, it is not clear if this pottery began independently in each of these three areas or spread from one original source. From a world perspective, however, this early East Asian pottery is remarkable not only for its great antiquity but also for its association with hunter-gatherer societies. In Southeast Asia, in contrast to East Asia, pottery arrived much later in the Holocene with the spread of farming. In Russia and Korea, the term ‘Neolithic’ is applied to early Holocene foraging cultures with pottery. The Jomon cultures of Japan could also be classified in this way, though Japanese archaeologists rarely use the term ‘Neolithic’. In China and Southeast Asia, ‘Neolithic’ refers to agricultural societies (see Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures).