Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter-gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter-gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC-800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.
The origins and consequences of warfare or largescale intergroup violence have been subject of long debate. Based on exhaustive surveys of skeletal remains for prehistor ic hunter-gatherers and agriculturists in Japan, the present study examines levels of inferred violence and their implications for two different evolutionary models, i.e., parochial altruism model and subsistence model. The former assumes that frequent warfare played an important role in the evolution of altruism and the latter sees warfare as promoted by social changes induced by agriculture. Our results are inconsistent with the parochial altruism model but consistent with the subsistence model, although the mortality values attributable to violence between hunter-gatherers and agriculturists were comparable.
SfM/MVS photogrammetry has received increasing attention due to its convenience, broadening the range of its applications into archaeology and anthropology. Because the accuracy of SfM/MVS depends on photography, one important issue is that incorrect or low-density point clouds are found in 3D models due to poor overlapping between images. A systematic way of taking photographs solve these problems, though it has not been well established and the accuracy has not been examined either, with some exceptions. The present study aims to (i) develop an efficient method for recording pottery using an automated turntable and (ii) assess its accuracy through a comparison with 3D models made by laser scanning. We recorded relatively simple pottery manufactured by prehistoric farmers in the Japanese archipelago using SfM/MVS photogrammetry and laser scanning. Further, by measuring the Hausdorff distance between 3D models made using these two methods, we show that their difference is negligibly small, suggesting that our method is sufficiently accurate to record pottery.
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