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Preface to the Special Issue: New studies on early modern humans from Okinawa, South Japan

2011; Volume: 119; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1537/ase.110620

1348-8570

Yousuke Kaifu, Yuji Mizoguchi,

Archaeology and ancient environmental studies

Synthetic Research on the Transition of the Japanese from the Pleistocene to the Jomon and Yayoi Periods' with financial support from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science.This Special Issue of Anthropological Science was planned to gather together some of the research results regarding the anthropology of the Pleistocene of Okinawa, South Japan.Few Palaeolithic human fossils have been found in the Japanese archipelago, except for the Ryukyu (Okinawa) region.So far, human bones securely dated to before the pottery-associated Jomon period (i.e.older than c. 15000 cal.BP) are known only from a single site on the mainland Japan, namely Hamakita (Suzuki, 1966;Suzuki and Endo, 1966;Kondo and Matsu'ura, 2005).In contrast to most areas of the mainland, where acidic soils hamper bone preservation, the Ryukyu Islands has yielded abundant fossils of extinct deer and other Pleistocene mammalian species because of its karstic nature (Oshiro, 2001).The search for human fossils began in the Ryukyus as early as the 1930s, and two important discoveries were made in the 1960s at the Yamashita-cho Cave I and the Minatogawa Fissure on Okinawa island (Watanabe, 1980).Juvenile lower limb bones were excavated by Takamiya et al. (1975) from the Yamashita-cho Cave I in 1968.The stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating of charcoal suggested that these bones are c.32000 14 C BP, making them currently the oldest human fossils from Japan (Suzuki, 1983).One nearly complete (Minatogawa I) and three partial (Minatogawa II-IV) skeletons, as well as other fragmentary human bones found from the Minatogawa Fissure, are truly significant in terms of the current fossil record of early modern humans from East Asia.The site and morphology of the Minatogawa skeletons were reported in 1982 as a monograph (Suzuki and Hanihara, 1982), in which the skulls, dentitions, and postcranial elements were described by Suzuki, Hanihara and Ueda, and Baba and Endo, respectively (see Kaifu and Fujita, 2011, for a more detailed review of these two sites).After these important discoveries and initial publications,