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Diprount_Tomato@lemmy.world 10 months agoThen why are all their resources either inexistent or scarce? Did they use them all while still being in a voluntary state of prehistory?
Comment on [deleted]
Diprount_Tomato@lemmy.world 10 months agoThen why are all their resources either inexistent or scarce? Did they use them all while still being in a voluntary state of prehistory?
CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
Yes and no: the resources that made Japan very viable for hunter-gatherer societies are very different from the resources that make an area viable for agricultural societies.
Whereas agricultural societies value open areas and metal ore a lot, the jomon societies lived primarily off foraging and hunting in wooded areas. With the rise of agriculture, those areas largely disappeared, to the point where Japan was almost deforested.
Seafood is also something Japan had a huge abundance of, but like most of the world, they overfished their stocks.
For the “no” part: Resources like metal ore, coal, oil, waterfalls for hydropower, etc. do not make a hunter-gatherer society less viable, but can serve to make an already highly technologically developed society even more viable. The point being that although Japan had an abundance of resources making hunter-gatherer lifestyles much more viable than in most of the world, they can still lack in resources that are valuable to Iron Age and later societies.
The result is that
1: It took longer for agriculture to become a viable competitor against hunting/gathering in Japan.
2: Once agriculture was adopted, the resources in demand were not in high supply (as they weren’t there in there in the first place).