Minatogawa 1

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Minatogawa 1 ( Japanese 港 川 人 1 号 , Minatogawa-jin 1-gō or 港 川 人 , Minatogawa-jin , literally: "Minatogawa man") is the archive name for the almost complete remains of the skeleton of a modern person ( Homo sapiens ) , which was discovered in 1970 in the Minatogawa limestone quarry in the urban area of ​​today's Yaese on the Japanese island of Okinawa by the businessman Seiho Ōyama. Together with three somewhat less well-preserved female skeletons, these finds are among the oldest reliably dated evidence of the presence of Homo sapiens in East Asia . In total, skeletal remains were found that could have come from five to nine individuals.

Locations

The Nansei Islands , including Okinawa and the Ryūkyū Islands to the south-west , were connected to one another and to Taiwan by land bridges in the Young Pleistocene - that is, during the Ice Ages - due to the then low water levels of the world's oceans . This has been proven by fossils for Okinawa since the 1930s, among other things through the discovery of elephant , deer and rat fossils. In 1962, fossil human bones and presumed stone tools were discovered for the first time in the Katabaru Cave on the island of Iejima . As a result, early archaeological and paleoanthropological traces were searched for in various places .

They found what they were looking for in 1970, among other places, around 10 kilometers southeast of Naha in the Minatogawa quarry in a layer that was dated using various methods to 18,250 ± 650 years BP and 16,600 ± 300 years BP .

description

The Minatogawa 1 skeleton was recovered from a rock crevice, almost completely intact. His bones were found in an approximately anatomically normal position, but upside down; the bone finds of the other individuals, however, were scattered over a larger area. Minatogawa 1 belonged to a relatively short man whose size was estimated at 1.55 meters, and the skull is correspondingly small with an internal volume of 1390 cm³. The unusual location where Minatogawa 1 was found (upside down) and several broken bones in the other skeletons could, according to Hisashi Suzuki, the author of the first detailed description of the find (in Chapter 2), indicate cannibalism ; According to this interpretation, the victim's body would have been thrown upside down into a crevice in the limestone formation.

The face is relatively wide and flat and resembles the Liujiang fossil from Guangxi , People's Republic of China , it was said in 1991 is a journal; however, several facial bones were broken, so that the reconstruction was uncertain. Mongoloid features were ascribed to the skeleton Minatogawa 1; it resembles the present-day inhabitants of the Ryūkyū Islands .

A craniometric study that examined Minatogawa 1 and Minatogawa 2 and compared them with other populations came to the conclusion in 2011 that the Minatogawa people were not related to other populations of the Jomon period. The scientists are discussing the possibility of a relationship with South Asian populations. According to the scientists, however, the Minatogawa 1 and 2 are not related to the rest of the indigenous people of Japan and are very different from today's inhabitants of the Ryūkyū Islands.

However, according to another study, the Minatogawa people show no kinship with South or South East Asian populations.

Web links

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  • Hisashi Suzuki, Kazuro Hanihara (Eds.): (1982). The Minatogawa Man. The Upper Pleistocene Man from the Island of Okinawa . In: Bulletin No. 19 , University Museum of the University of Tokyo, Tokyo 1982, full text (PDF)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 港 川 人 ゆ か り の 地 巡 り (Japanese)
  2. ↑ Peter Brown : The first modern East Asians? Another look at Upper Cave 101, Liujiang and Minatogawa 1. In: Keiichi Omoto (Ed.): Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese. International Research Center for Japanese Studies , Kyoto 1999, p. 112, full text (PDF; 2.0 MB) ( Memento from May 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Hisao Baba, Shuichiro Narasaki: Minatogawa Man in East Asia . In: The Quaternary Research (daiyonki-kenkyu) . tape 30 , January 1, 1991, pp. 221–230 , doi : 10.4116 / jaqua.30.221 ( researchgate.net [accessed July 27, 2018]).
  4. ↑ Hisao Baba, Reiko T. Kono, Masaki Fujita, Yousuke Kaifu: Late Pleistocene modern human mandibles from the Minatogawa Fissure site, Okinawa, Japan: morphological affinities and implications for modern human dispersals in East Asia . In: Anthropological Science . tape 119 , no. 2 , 2011, ISSN  0918-7960 , p. 137–157 , doi : 10.1537 / ase.090424 ( jst.go.jp [accessed August 14, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Michael Pietrusewsky: A multivariate analysis of measurements recorded in early and more modern crania from East Asia and Southeast Asia . In: Quaternary International . tape 211 , no. 1-2 . Elsevier, January 1, 2010, p. 42–54 , doi : 10.1016 / j.quaint.2008.12.011 (English, psu.edu [PDF]).