Japan - America, Paleolithic links?

Continuing with the Japanese-American links during the early peopling of America, this post looks into a paper published last year (Madsen DB, Davis LG, Williams TJ, Izuho M, Iizuka F. Characterizing the American Upper Paleolithic. Sci Adv. 2025 Oct 24;11(43):eady9545. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ady9545. Epub 2025 Oct 22. PMID: 41124256; PMCID: PMC12542946).

This paper's abstract suggests a link between stone-tool technology in Japan and America, and says that people migrated from Japan via Beringia into America! These people played an important role in the American Upper Paleolithic (AUP).

"In North America, there are enough sites with relatively large tool assemblages predating ~13,500 calibrated years before the present (cal yr B.P.) to allow assessment of the underlying characteristics of their shared lithic tradition. Their shared technological features involve the use of dual core-and-blade and biface technologies similar to those in the Northeast Asian Late Upper Paleolithic. These dual approaches were often merged to produce small projectile points, including stemmed point forms using an elliptical cross-sectional ogive design. Similar dual lithic technologies are found in assemblages in northern Japan dating to ~20,000 cal yr B.P. We suggest a group with a similar lithic technology became isolated somewhere in the vicinity of the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kuril region, developing genetically into ancestral American populations. Between ~22,000 and ~18,000 cal yr B.P., a subset of this population migrated along the southern Beringian and Northwest coasts into the Americas. By ~16,000 to ~15,000 cal yr B.P., they had become widely dispersed across North America."

Map showing the locations of major physiographic regions discussed in the text (A). Map showing the location of AUP sites in North America discussed in the text (B).. Fig. 1 in Madsen DB, Davis LG, Williams TJ, Izuho M, Iizuka F., (2025)

It mentions an old site, Cactus Hil, in the southern part of Virgina, dated at 18,000 years BP or even earlier! Gault, in Texas, that is between 16.7 and 21.7 ky old.

The authors say that: "Given this wide distribution and the associated age range, we speculate that the initial occupation of lower-latitude North America likely occurred around 20,000 cal yr B.P... Paleogenetics suggest the founding North American AUP populations formed somewhere in Northeast Asia when North-Central Eurasian populations merged with East Asian populations sometime before ~20,000 cal yr B.P." (Note: American Upper Paleolithic is "AUP").

An oceanic voyage

The paper suggests that the Japanese people moved in boats:

"This migration may have taken place over the course of a thousand years or more, lasting 40 to 50 generations and involving a series of movements of people from one place to another relatively nearby location. This wave of advance population movement may easily have used short coastal voyages in waters between off-shore currents and the wave breaker zone and could have enabled such migrants to access coastal refugia, which became differentially available through time. If so, then relatively adverse environmental conditions may not have been an obstacle, especially because migration may have been difficult during any period of the LGM. Alternatively, the migration may have been rapid but also have occurred any time. By ~30,000 cal yr B.P., Upper Paleolithic seafarers were using sea-going vessels to access some of the outer islands in the Japanese archipelago, e.g., and were capable of negotiating the Kuroshio Current, one of the fastest in the world. This suggests that such experienced seafarers may also have been capable of handling adverse Pacific coastal currents. Either way, environmental constraints on the timing of the initial occupation of the Americas may not have been much of a factor... The precise location of the initial AUP population within the larger PSHK region or its margins remains unknown, but the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido is a strong candidate."

A very interesting suggestion indeed! Early peopling, by boat, using the same currents that pushed Japanese junks towards America during historical times.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Ancient Japanese influence in prehistoric South America

My previous post explored the junk shipwrecks and Japanese castaways found along the coast of Northwestern America (Alaska, Canada, the U.S), and also Hawaii. Today we will look into the ancient links between Japan and South America.

Back in 2014 I posted about the Jomons and Ecuadorian Valdivias, and mentioned a paper published in 1962 (Emilio Estrada, Clifford Evans and Betty Meggers, Possible Transpacific Contact on the Coast of Ecuador. Science135,371-372 (1962). DOI:10.1126/science.135.3501.371)

Betty Jane Meggers (1921-2012) suggested that trans-Pacific contact some 5,000 years ago, linking Japan and Ecuador. She based her hypothesis on the similarities between the Japanese Jomon people and the Valdiviann people of Ecuador.

In a paper putting forward this idea was published 60 years ago: Transpacific origin of Valdivia Phase Pottery on Coastal Ecuador (Clifford Evans and Betty J Meggers, XXXVI Congreso Internacional de Americanistas de España 1964, Vol 1, 1966), Meggers and her colleague Evans outline how the contact took place:

"Consolidation of evidence relevant to the origin of the Valdivia Phase leads to a reconstruction of events somewhat as follows. Some 5000 years ago the coasts of Japan and western America were occupied by small groups of people who subsisted by fishing and shellfish gathering supplemented by hunting of ter restrial mammals.
In addition to gathering of plants they may have taken initial steps toward cultivation.
Their tools and utensils though differing in details of construction were of similar kinds fishhooks awis choppers flakes sinkers hammerstones indicating a similar level of technological competence and a similar ecological adaptation.
In Japan sites are found not only along the coast but up river valleys into the interior where salmon fishing hunting of terrestrial fauna and an unusually rich edible flora seem to have approximated wild food conditions on the northwest coast of North America. Bones from the refuse indicate that deep sea fishing provided part of the food supply from early times and dugout canoes have been found that provide information on the type of water craft used.
If a boatload of Early Middle Jomon fishermen left the sheltering bays of Kyushu and went out into the sea off the southeastern coast in October or November they would have entered a zone with some of the strongest currents in the northern Pacific running northeastward at 24 43 miles per day. Records for the 40 year period between 1901 1940 tabulate 802 typhoons of which 130 were in October and 67 in November. A canoe caught too far from shore by one of these storms might easily be swept by the combined northeasterly pressure of wind and current far out to sea before control was regained. Even if the occupants retained possession of their paddles they might have been unable to turn back. During the month of November westerly and northerly winds pre dominate in the northern hemisphere and are steadiest and of greatest force between about the 40th and 55th parallels In addition the percentage of gales increases during November in high latitudes occurring at an average frequency of one every 8 10 days over the greater part of the northern Pacific except near coasts. A combination of these forces would have borne a canoe eastward along the great circle route which on a flattened map curves far north of Hawaii Records during the past century demonstrate the feasibility of such a drift vessel reaching land with living passengers after a voyage of 11 months (Sittig 1896 p 530). Indeed the possibility of survival would be stronger for people accustomed to living from the sea than for land oriented agriculturalists of more recent times. Arriving on the Ecuadorian shore the travelers were met or soon found by the local residents who presumably were living much the same kind of life as had been left behind on Kyushu fishing shellfish gathering a little hunting and gathering of plants for food and fiber. The results make it apparent that the newcomers were welcomed and incorporated into the community. In the process they introduced the art of pottery making and very probably new religious practices that are reflected in the Valdivia stone figurines. Other new ideas may also have been incorporated but no tangible evidence has been recognized The Valdivians quickly became skillful potters and in fact the most striking aspect of the ware is its superiority in quality and artistry to pottery not only of contemporary Kyushu but also of other very early ceramic complexes in the New World. It is an ironical fact that attempts to relate Valdivia ceramics to those of Guañape on the coast of Peru Monagrillo on the Pacific coast of Panama or Puerto Hormiga on the Caribbean coast of Colombia involve more tenuous comparative evidence than can be brought to support the inference of Jomon Valdivia connections.
Undoubtedly this situation if properly under stood would shed light on the kind of contact that underlay diffusion of pottery making both north and south from the coast of Ecuador."

The idea sounds interesting, and it also accounts for the "figurines" or female statuetes (Venus) found in Ecuador.

More recently (see Betty J. Meggers. 2005. The Subversive Significance of Transpacific Contact. The NEARA Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter): pp. 22-29.), twenty years ago, Meggers mentions the common variety of Human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV-1), as "another pathology shared by Japanese and Andeans... which is transmitted between adult males and females by sexual contact and between nursing mothers and infants. Today, the highest occurrence in the world of carriers of the HTLV-1 antibody is in Japan, where it reaches a frequency of 6% in Kyushu... Among modern populations in the Americas, it is restricted to the Andean area. Like the parasites, a post-Columbian introduction is ruled out by its presence in the bone marrow of 1500-year-old Chilean mummies... Among modern carriers are the Nanoama, an indigenous group that lives on the lower San Juan River, which drains into the Pacific coast of Colombia."

Meggers added that a study sound genetic similarities between these Nanoma people and the Jomons: "A comparison of the global distribution of 13 genetic markers also identifies the closest affiliation of the Nanoama with people of Jomon ancestry in Japan."

Meggers also suggests that the bottle gourd (Lagenaria sicerania) was brought to America by the Jomons: "an Old World cultigen that appeared in the Americas ca. 6000 B.P.—was among the Jomon introductions is supported by its presence in Japan by the Initial Jomon Period."

Regarding the ceramics, Meggers pointed out "the discovery of another intrusive complex of similar age on the north coast of Colombia, known as San Jacinto."

However, not everyone agrees with this theory. For instance, Scott, G. R. et al., (2021). Peopling the Americas: Not “Out of Japan.” PaleoAmerica, 7(4), 309–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2021.1940440, refute it, without mentioning the Jomons or Ecuador and Colombia. Instead it focused on stone knapping techniques which seem similar in both Jomon Japan and North America:

"A widely accepted model for the peopling of the Americas postulates a source population in the Northeast Asian maritime region, which includes northern Japan. The model is based on similarities in stone artifacts (stemmed points) found in North American sites dating as early as 15,000 years ago and those of comparable age in Japan and neighboring regions of Northeast Asia. Here we show, on the basis of data and analyses in biological anthropology, that the people who made stemmed points in northern Japan (labeled “Incipient Jomon” in the archaeological literature) represent an unlikely source population for the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere."

Even the origin of the ceramics style is disputed, (Kanomata Y, Marcos J, Popov A, Lazin B, Tabarev A. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/new-data-on-early-pottery-traditions-in-south-america-the-san-pedro-complex-ecuador/8885FD3A582F285F93728325C4945B66. Antiquity. 2019;93(369):e17. doi:10.15184/aqy.2019.56), says it originated in a pre-Valdivian culture in Ecuador: "These new data on San Pedro pottery from Real Alto demonstrate its stratigraphical, typological and chronological identity as one of the earliest ceramic forms in the Americas, and they confirm the existence of Early Formative cultural variability in Ecuador." Meaning they may seem similar Jomon and Valdivian, but they have different origins.

Regarding genetics, as mentioned in my 2014 post, there are similarities regarding what then was known as the Y-chromosome haplogroup C3* (nomenclature has changed since then, but the concept is still valid). C3* is rare in America, it is found among the Jomons and also among Ecuadorian and Colombian people, but not elsewhere in America. Surprisingly, the Japanese C3* variant is different to the one found in Colombia and Ecuador.

The American variant is now known as subclade C-P39 (formerly C3b). A paper (Insights into the origin of rare haplogroup C3* Y chromosomes in South America from high-density autosomal SNP genotyping, Mezavilla et al., 2015) studied the matter: "C3* Y chromosomes were discovered in two nearby Native American populations from Ecuador. Since this haplogroup is otherwise nearly absent from the Americas but is common in East Asia, and an archaeological link between Ecuador and Japan is known from 6Kya, an additional migration 6Kya was suggested. Here, we... evaluate three hypotheses: a recent migration from Japan, a single pulse of migration from Japan 6Kya, and no migration after the First Americans... Our simulations revealed good power to detect recent admixture, and that ≥5% admixture 6Kya ago could be detected. However, in the experimental data we saw no evidence of gene flow from Japan to Ecuador. In summary, we can exclude recent migration and probably admixture 6Kya as the source of the C3* Y chromosomes in Ecuador, and thus suggest that they represent a rare founding lineage lost by drift elsewhere." The map below is from this paper.

Hypotheses to explain the presence of C3* Y chromosomes in Ecuador but not elsewhere in the Americas. Green line: the chromosomes were carried by the First American founder population 15–20Kya, but have been lost by drift from other present-day Native American populations examined. Blue line: they were introduced from Japan by a migration identified by archaeologists around 6Kya. Orange line: they were introduced from East Asia in the last generation or two. The violet line represents an ancestral population that split around 25–27Kya into the ancestors of present-day East Asians and Native Americans, and is incorporated into the demographic model used in this work.. From Mezavilla et al. (2015)

They rejected the Jomon admixture 6,000 years ago yet mentioned that "The estimated TMRCA for the combined Ecuadorian C3* chromosomes was 5.0–6.2Kya. The finding of this haplogroup in Ecuador was surprising because C3* is otherwise unreported from the Americas (apart from one example in Alaska), but is widespread and common in East Asia."

The sensitivity of the study is low. Imagine a boatload of Jomon people mixing into Native Americans, they would represent a low percentage of the total population, the study is not sensitive enough to measure low introgression rates: "The power to detect ancient admixture at these levels therefore depends on the sensitivity to detect the reduced admixture in the present-day population. For example, if 0.1% mean population admixture can be detected in the present-day population, we have ∼80% power to detect 5% ancient admixture and ∼100% power to detect 10% ancient admixture. If, instead, we could only detect 0.5% mean admixture in the present-day population, we have ∼0 power to detect 5% ancient admixture and ∼35% power to detect 10% ancient admixture... Immediately after a pulse of 10% migration, almost all individuals in the Admixed population have >5% and >1% admixture. 6Ky later, in the present-day population, about 1% of the Admixed individuals retain 5% admixture, and about 17% retain 1% admixture. In all simulations, negligible admixture is detected in the Control population. Overall, we have good power to detect 10% admixture that took place 6Kya, and some power to detect 5% ancient admixture." The authors indicate that "had good power to detect 1% recent admixture and 10% ancient admixture, with some power to detect 5% ancient admixture" which seems rather high, surely the impact of Jomon people would have been lower, probably it was amplified by genetic drift. Perhaps their Asian genes added some immunity to the Amerindians and this gave them a selective benefit when confronted with Spanish-introduced diseases after 1492.

It is interesting to point out that the Valdivia people lived (see google map) very close to the spot (Manta) where Inca Tupac Yupanqui learned that people in big boats came to trade with the local natives, and which have been assumed to be Polynesians. But, what if they were Japanese? Merchants who had kept up the transpacific contact for millennia...

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Japanese junks in Canada

While researching the Chinese and Polynesian voyages to America, I found some references that mentioned junks on the Northwestern coast of America that came from Japan, blown eastwards by typhoons, or dragged away from Japan by the Kuroshio Current (or "Black Current") that in a similar way to the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, heads with a SW to NE direction along the eastern shores of Taiwan and Japan, towards Bering and the Aleutian Islands. (Kuroshio means "black") or Japan Current, is a powerful, warm ocean current flowing north along the eastern coast of Taiwan.

These wrecks and potential castaways suggest that rafts from Asia could have been dragged across the North Pacific Ocean to the coast of western Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and even further south, to Mexico and South America.

The evidence: shipwrecked junks and castaways

Julian Ralph in his work On Canada's Frontier (1892), recalls that when the first European traders visited the mouth of the Columbia River, they found in the sand a shipwreck and 12,000 pounds (5.4 MT) of beeswax in it, they surmised it was a Japanese junk that had been dragged by the oceanic currents acorss the Pacific. He also mentions a "local legend" about a junk that capsized by Cape Flattery in 1834, with a pottery cargo, and three men on it.

The junk with three men is also mentioned in a book published in 1861: "...in 1833 a junk was cast ashore on the American coast at Cape Flattery opposite Vancouver Island, three men being still alive out of an original crew of seventeen."

Much more detail on both the beeswax wreck and the 1833 junk can be found in the account by Samuel Parker in A Journey Beyond the Rocky Mountains in 1835, 1836, and 1837 (1841):

"Abouth thirty miles south of the river there are the remains of a ship sunk not far from the shore. It is not known by whom she was owned nor from what part of the world she came nor when cast away. The Indians frequently get bees wax from her It is not improbable that she was from some part of Asia.
A Japanese junk was cast away fifteen miles south of Cape Flattery in March 1833. Out of seventeen men only three were saved. In the following May Captain M Neil of the Lama brought the three survivors to Fort Vancouver where they were kindly treated by the gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay Company and in the following October they were sent in one of their ships to England to be forwarded to their own country and home. This junk was laden with rich Chinaware cotton cloths and rice. In the same year eleven Japanese in distress were drifted in a junk to Oahu Sandwich Islands [Note by AW: Now known as Hawaii] It is not very un common for junks and other craft to be found by whale ships in the great Pacific Ocean their crews in a state of starvation without the nautical instruments and skill necessary to enable them to find their way to any port of safety. Undoubtedly many are entirely lost while others drift to unknown shores. May not the above facts throw light upon the original peopling of America which has engaged the attention of men for a long period..."

One of the three men, was Manjiro Nakahama (1827-1898), a 14-year-old boy. Later he was known as John Manjiro and John Mung, by 1846 he had found work on a whaler and visited his former crewmates who remained in Hawaii (unable to return to Japan). John became wealthy in the 1849 California gold rush, and managed to return to Japan, where he became a translator, samurai, and government official; he helped Japan "Westernize" its navy.

The repatriation of the Sandwich Island castaways is described in detail in the January 1838 issue of the Army and Navy Chronicle. The men were sent to Canton, China (now Guangzhou) and were to be sent to Japan with a group of Christian Missionaries who were aiming at opening up Japan to foreigners (they failed, Japan only opened up in 1854 when a fleet of U.S. naval ships intimidated them into doing so. It was commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry).

The "closed country" policy known as shakoku that had been adopted by Japan in the 1600s was designed to keep foreigners out of their country (they had had bad experiences with Portuguese, the Christian missionaries and they had seen the negative consequences of Spanish and Portuguese influence in Asia). It also kept Japanese inside of Japan, a kind of "bamboo curtain" of the XVIth century. Deep sea sailing was restricted. Japanese vessels would only sail in their coastal waters. This led to less sophisticated designs. Below is a one-mast junk of the type that Perry encountered during his visits to Japan.

Japanese “junk” as recorded by the Perry mission in the official Narrative. Source

Unfortunately, the "opening up" of Japan, led to a period of rapid modernization and "Europeanization" (Westernization) known as the Meiji Restoration, where they excelled at being "Western", and by 1904 defeated Russia in a War, and in 1937, with fascist and nationalist ideals (allied with Italy and Germany in an Axis), invaded China, Korea, and on December 7, 1941 attacked Peral Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II. But, let's focus on the transpacific contacts.

There is an excellent book published in 1876 by Charles Wolcott Brooks (Japanese Wrecks stranded and picked up adrift in the North Pacific Ocean, Ethnologically considered). It documents different stray ships, starting with one found in Acapulco, Mexico in 1617. It also mentions the 1833 Cape Flattery castaways. In total, it lists sixty events involving junks. The ones who managed to reach America, had an influence on the local natives:

"Small parties of male Japanese have repeatedly reached the American continent by sea, cast upon its shores after floating helplessly for months. Until recently, the survivors must have remained permanently near where they landed, and naturally uniting with women of the native races, have left descendents more or less impressed with their physical peculiarities. Such a slow, limited, but constant infusion of Japanese blood, almost entirely from male seamen, was undoubtedly sufficient to modify the original stock of all coast tribes along our north-western shore. No marks exist of any immigration en masse, neither is there any present record of any Japanese woman saved from such a wreck, although cases may formerly have occurred, but must have been very rare. These unfortunate seamen, often illiterate, and separated from their sources of learning, necessarily lost their own language; but in doing so, doubtless contributed many isolated words to the Indian dialects of this coast."

Prior to the 1600s, the Japanese junks must have been largr and better equipped for deep-sea navigation. They could have reached America and returned to Japan. The Japanese followed the design of the large Chinese junks, with sails, despite an initial period of isolation (900-1300 AD). They then advanced their knowhow with ships that resembled caravels in the 1300s and 1400s. Civil war led to the design of warships. (Source).

My next post will look into the Japanese and ancient transpacific contact with South America.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

"Mongoloid genes" in the Azores, a paper from 1999

Today's post is about a paper published in 1999 (paywall) by Bruges-Armas J, Martinez-Laso J, Martins B, et al. HLA in the Azores Archipelago: possible presence of Mongoloid genes. Tissue Antigens 1999; 54(4): 349-59.

The abstract copied below mentionsthe presence of certain HLA haplotypes found in the Azorean population, in Asians, but not in Europeans.

"The HLA profile of the Azoreans has been compared with those of other world populations in order to provide additional information regarding the history of their origins. The allele frequencies, genetic distances between populations, correspondence analyses and most frequent haplotypes were calculated. Our results indicate that the Azorean population most likely contains an admixture of high-frequency Caucasoid, Mongoloid and, to a lesser degree, Negroid HLA genes. The middle Atlantic Azores Archipelago was officially colonized by the Portuguese after 1439 and historical records are concordant with the existence of Caucasoid and Negroid population. However, Mongoloid genes were not suspected, but the Oriental HLA haplotypes A24-B44-DR6-DQ1, A29-B21-DR7-DQ2 and A2-B50-DR7-DQ2 are the fourth, fifth and sixth most frequent ones in Azores. A correspondence analysis shows that the Azorean population is equidistant from Asian and European populations and genetic distances are in some cases closer to the Asian than to European ethnic groups, and never are significantly different; also, B*2707 subtype is found in Asians and Azoreans (but not in Europeans) and the same Machado-Joseph Disease founder haplotypes (Chr 14) are found in both Japanese and Azoreans. It is proposed that a Mongoloid population exists in Azores; whether, the arrival occurred prior to discovery is undetermined."

Possibly the Portuguese trade with East Asia, namely Formosa (Taiwan), Macao (a Portuguese colony on mainland China), Canton (as a trading post next to Macao), and Japan (though briefly), plus their extensive trading network across Malacca, India and what is now Indonesa (Timor) are facts that could suggest an inflow of Asian people into the Azores on the Portuguese merchant vessels.

Portuguese empire map. Source

An article published by BBC reports that the Portuguese captured or purchased Japanese people as slaves, not to work in Brazil (they preferred the African slaves for the hard work there), but as domestic slaves in Portugal and Lisbon. The article states that "The oldest record is that of Jacinta de Sa Brandao, a Japanese slave who married Guilherme Brandao, also a Japanese slave, in the Conceicao Church in Lisbon in 1573. Jacinta is the first Japanese woman known to have lived in Portugal."

Chinese slaves were also obtained in Macao, and from the pirates that raided the coastal villages of China (read more in this paper). The Portuguese also introduced African slaves into India and China (Source).

Regarding Machado-Joseph Disease (or MJD), a paper suggested "that MJD in Japanese and Azorean subjects may represent allelic or identical mutations at the same locus" implying that the Japanese and Azorean people had separate mutations that were identical. Not that Japanese somehow intermingled with Azoreans and passed on this disease.

So, no, it isn't a case of Chinese junks sailing the Atlantic and discovering the Azores (as claimed by Gavin Menzies. I already reviewed and criticized his book "1421 The year China discovered the World"). It was the slave trade that brought Asian genetic markers into Europe and the Azores.

Map of the "Chinese Treasure Fleets Voyages" from Menzies (does not show the Azores, instead it shows Cape Verde Islands - also discovered by the Portuguese and uninhabited before their arrival.)

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©