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."
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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