Japan’s Jōmon era lasted roughly fourteen thousand years
Between about 14,000 and 300 BC, the Japanese archipelago hosted Jōmon communities—diverse hunter-gatherers and early farmers who settled enough to build a dense material culture. Their pottery, pressed with cords while wet, still names the whole archaeological age.
The name means cord-marked, after the way potters rolled cords across the damp outer surface of their vessels. Alongside that pottery the era produced figurines, lacquerware, and tools and ornaments of bone, stone, shell and antler. Archaeologists slice the span into ever-shorter phases, from the Incipient (13,750–8,500 BC) through Initial, Early, Middle and Late to the Final phase, whose end newer work pushes to 300 BC. Radiocarbon dating puts the start of the following Yayoi period between 500 and 300 BC, although Yayoi-style pots have turned up at a Jōmon site in northern Kyushu from 800 BC.
The period opened while Japan was still a narrow peninsula of the Asian mainland. As glaciers melted after about 12,000 BC, rising seas cut the islands off, leaving Kyushu some 190 kilometres from Korea: close enough for occasional contact, far enough for separate development. Forests changed too, with evergreen broadleaf trees in the southwest and deciduous trees and conifers in the northeast. Chestnuts, beech nuts, buckeyes and acorns were gathered and stored in underground pits over winter.
In the northeast the cold Oyashio Current brought salmon, and coastal communities on both seas ate so much shellfish that their discarded shell mounds are now prime archaeological archives. Deer, wild boar, tubers and river fish filled out the diet.
The label does not fit the whole archipelago: Okinawa and the Ryukyus use a separate Shellmidden chronology because Jōmon people were largely absent there. Genetics shows a mixed population, and modern Japanese carry about 30% Jōmon ancestry on the paternal side but only around 15% maternally and 10% overall, an imbalance dubbed the admixture paradox. Two Hokkaido groups later merged into the proto-Ainu, and some linguists link Japonic languages to a Jōmon population in the southwest.
Source: Jōmon period
