I’m going to guess that the bushy beard (and the straight nose and hair colour?) of that trader are meant to imply that he is Ainu. The beard seems similar to the beard of the Ainu leader on the Wikipedia page, but that photograph is from 1930, so I wonder if they are applying the look of a man in the 20th century to this prehistoric character…
Looking for more information about prehistoric Ainu, I also came across this website, which mentions theories that the Ainu are actually descended from the Jomon people so that would mean that the protagonists of our story should have already looked like Ainu…
Had this exact thought, despite having just been taught the other もり
We’re painting with some real wide brush strokes here, so I’m trying not to be too bothered by the fact that all the characters look pretty much exactly the same to me.
“Uh many of these skeleton appear to be missing teeth…”
Archeologist: “Coming of age ritual where they pulled teeth!”
“What?! Anyway, we also found an ancient trash pile with a bunch of animal carcasses and bits of broken tools…”
Archeologist: “ok but have you considered that it could be a holy trash pile?”
But then I explain that they bound the dead bodies when burying them because they had a zombie situation and I’m getting kicked off the convention center. Explain that!
I visited the Kasori Shell Mounds in Chiba during a trip with a friend back in 2018. They were in the middle of hosting some sort of school excursion for elementary school kids, part of which involved teaching some prehistoric techniques, and they asked if we’d like to join in, so we learnt how to start a fire with a bow drill.
And we saw the shell mounds too, of course.
Yeah, I consulted Google on this one, and the consensus from thirty seconds of scanning result summaries seems to be that they only bound the bodies after suicides and the like, because there was a concern they might get up again and start causing trouble. Though I guess in this instance, the god of the mountain was responsible for the death, sooo… something something?
Prevent Rigor Mortis from making the body look too unnatural
I see it as almost a written version of what could have been oral history. So Hajime can be a character with his own arc in the story, while also representing countless people who did the things he does in the story. I really like that approach
I agree, it’s not very realistic but it makes the story more entertaining if we’re following a small group of people. I presume that we’re done with yumi and hajime now though since apparently we’re getting a timeskip in chapter two.
I feel like it’s weird to say that I liked the part where the grandfather died, but I appreciate the excuse to show us ancient burial rituals and how fleeting life was then.
This is fun. I like reading about stuff and then googling it and looking at pictures. I also think this book has a pretty good balance between storyline scenes (that are easy to read) and pages with information (that take more lookups).
First there was communism and everybody was happy. Then the capitalist pigs decided to trade obsidian and now I have to learn Javascript.
More seriously they also show how precarious life was back then, but it’s true that they don’t dwell on interpersonal conflict. That said, we have very little historical evidence to draw upon in order to reconstitute how these dynamics worked.
While we have found violently killed prehistoric people, we’ve found more preciously buried ones as far as I can tell and I think that says something positive of how other people cared for each other
There’s a book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell about how when folks are faced with hellish situations (such as natural disaster) they can form idyllic communities. I think it’s reasonable to guess that the same sort of thing happened in prehistoric times, when survival was more frequently in question. And to this book’s credit they haven’t skimped on showing that life could be brutal at that time, although obviously the general mood skews toward light and happy. (My favorite part is when Yumi says “gosh I hope it doesn’t hurt when they pull our teeth! ”)
I just think it’s always been and still is a “Us vs Them” thing. So I agree that they were probably very happy and collaborating in their “us” circle, the small village, but not so sure that it was going so well with the neighbors from the other territory that were competing for the same resources (“them”)
And I remember once reading that they found skeletons of people who had fractures that would’ve made them unable to contribute for a while, but which had healed, indicating that they were taken care of while they healed. Super vague anecdote, I know, but I think it shows how such conclusions could conceivably be drawn from archeological findings?
Anyway, my biggest surprise this week was coming across the word アスファルト. Did a double take there, but when I figured out it referred to naturally occurring bitumen it made a lot more sense! It reminds me of the salarymen from the channel I linked to last week using resin to attach obsidian (?) shards to an antler scythe to make it sharper.
Admittedly, I spent a lot of time on those first few pages before the first chapter last week.
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