Q&A for History of Mankind (30)

The origins of Japanese people & the history of drugs; plus questions on philosophy of history, Orientalism, the Gracchi and circus animals in Rome

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

This is the thirtieth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

As usual, a quick reminder: all new paying subscribers get an electronic copy of my 2023 book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” (also available here). If you are a paying subscriber and didn’t get a copy, just let me know!

Before we get to subscribers’ questions, I’d like to highlight a recent paper, with a very boring title and very interesting implications. In “Decoding triancestral origins, archaic introgression, and natural selection in the Japanese population by whole-genome sequencing,” Xiaoxi Liu et al looked at Japanese genomes to identify the ancestry of the archipelago’s population and came across a (somewhat) unexpected result.

The paper’s conclusion is that the people of Japan descend from a combination of  Korean immigrants, proto-Ainu Jomon people and a third ancestral group with possible ties to Northeast Asia, long referred to by Japanese historians as the Emishi people.

The Emishi, found primarily in northeastern Japan, were called “hairy people” by the Chinese in the mid-First millennium AD, and may have been somewhat related, but not identical, to the proto-Ainu. Until now, the Emishi had been considered a bit of a footnote to Japanese history, but the implication of this paper is that perhaps they should be given a more prominent role in the history of Japan’s early peopling.

As I recently wrote in “China's First Reunification & the Terracotta Warriors,” this history is mostly dominated by the dominant strand in the Japanese ancestor mix, the Koreans who crossed the sea to settle the archipelago:

After the founding of the Gija Joseon kingdom by a disgruntled Chinese prince, the first Korean kingdom and its successor states over the first half of the 1^st millennium BC maintained ties with northern Chinese states, a key source of technology, but not an invasion threat especially after the Zhou Dynasty disintegrated into what later be called Warring States. Elite Koreans may have used Chinese writing for trade and government records since about 400 BC, although the complex Chinese culture took a while to make of an impact on a cold, mountainous peninsula with little contact with outsiders and a tendency to warlordism.

Practical Chinese technologies, from bronze and iron weaponry to pottery techniques and rice cultivation, were more immediately valuable than learned texts on political theory and philosophy, and they made their way to the Japanese archipelago as Korean migrants and warriors crossed over there in search for new land and plunder, leading to seismic shifts in the local demography.

Up to this point, the historiography of early Japan has been dominated by concepts stressing Korean rule and the importation of Korean ways and culture into Japan. After all, Jomon-era skeletons, corresponding mostly to the people related to modern indigenous Ainu, are markedly different from and shorter than later Japanese skeletons.

The new paper adds some intrigue to this picture. The mysterious Emishi, long a curiosity, may end up being more prominent than we had suspected. And there’s one other thing that may have been more prominent than we had suspected, this time regarding Western history: psychedelic drugs.

As I wrote almost two years ago now, there’s long been a fascination with the rites conducted in sanctuaries such as Eleusis, some 20 kilometers northwest of Athens. These secret initiation rituals may have been completely disconnected from other worship expressions elsewhere in Greece, to the point that, in the 20th century AD amid a fashion for drug-taking and mistranslations, a notion grew among some scholars that the so-called Mysteries of Eleusis included psychedelic drugs.

There’s no evidence for this, or for raptures or for even the consumption of alcohol at Eleusis – alcohol was consumed at other religious events in Greece, but in Eleusis the week-long Mysteries were fueled by plain porridge. However, new evidence indicates that drugs were perhaps consumed around this time, only elsewhere in Europe — in Germany.

Germanic warriors in the centuries either side of the start of the Christian possibly consumed various kinds of narcotics, according to a new paper (“In a narcotic trance, or stimulants in Germanic communities of the Roman period”) by Anna Jarosz-Wilkołazka et al in De Gruyter. The researchers unearthed various kinds of what they consider drug paraphernalia, although they didn’t find any evidence of actual drugs, so the case can’t be considered closed.

The team analyzed the possible stimulants that Germanic tribes could have accessed either locally or via trade. The rather fanciful list includes poppy, hemp, hops, belladonna, henbane and numerous fungi, all of which could have been taken as a liquid or powder. Or not taken.

Now for the questions from paying subscribers, on the philosophy of history, Orientalism, how the Gracchi revolution reflects trends in modern US politics and circus animals in Rome.