Have you ever been making instant ramen, looked down at your cup, and thought something like "if only this cup was instead a faithful recreation of the Kaengata Doki pottery found during Japan's ...

“The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age,” historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” Come to think about it, wood tends to decay and ...

Archaeological sites in Hokkaido and the northern Tohoku region dating to the prehistoric Jomon Period, which lasted more than 10,000 years, are expected to soon be added to UNESCO’s World Cultural ...

Yet the relationship between the Jomon and the Ainu is anything but straightforward. Sometime around A.D. 600 to 700 in Hokkaido, rectangular pit-houses suddenly appear, and a new type of earthenware ...

Using X-rays, a researcher has imaged 28 impressions of maize weevils on pottery shards from the late Jomon period (around 3,600 years ago) excavated from the Yakushoden site in Miyazaki Prefecture.

Thousands of years ago, Japanese artisans had a habit of mixing maize weevils into their clay when making pottery. The recent discovery of a single pot packed with an estimated 500 weevils is adding ...

The Jomon Period of Japanese history is so shrouded in the mists of time that any bid to fathom its secrets stretches even the usual astonishing bounds of prehistoric archeology. Yet as amateurs and ...

Human history is a bloody patchwork of battles and wars that leaves many to conclude our species is inexorably drawn towards violence. But a new study of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Japan has ...

(Left) The location of the Yakushoden site where the pottery with insect (weevil) impressions was discovered is indicated by the number 1. (Other numbers in the image indicate areas discussed in the ...