By about 5,000 B.C.E., domesticated japonica is found throughout the Yangtse valley, including large amounts of rice kernels at such sites as TongZian Luojiajiao (7100 BP) and Hemuda (7000 BP).
A 2003 report in Antiquity interpreted them “not as writing itself, but as features of a lengthy period of sign-use which led eventually to a fully-fledged system of writing.
Xianrendong and Yuchanyan caves in northern China are the oldest of a growing number of sites which support the origins of pottery as having occurred not just in the Japanese island Jomon culture of 11,000-12,000 years ago, but earlier in the Russian Far East and South China some 18,000-20,000 years ago.
The earliest radiocarbon dates for the Paleolithic indicate the antiquity of occupation on the Korean peninsula is between 40,000 and 30,000 BP.
Japan was then connected to mainland Asia by at least one land bridge, and nomadic hunter-gatherers crossed to Japan.
