A very broad scope of east-west interaction among the Northeast Asian societies of this time is thus demonstrated (Zhushchikhovskaya, 2006). At higher latitudes in Northeastern China and the Russian Far East, the vast Amur River system provided Northeast Asia’s most productive interior fishery. In ethnohistoric times most of the Amur Basin’s considerable human population was aggregated into a small number of large settlements scattered along the Amur and its major Sungari and Ussuri tributaries. Most of the region’s known archeological sites and ethnographic period

settlements GW786034 clinical trial are found close together and in or near communities still occupied today. Settlement patters are topographically determined, as the seasonally flooding rivers have, over ages, created the Amur region

as a vast, low-lying alluvial plain with very little relief, where a relative few localities of higher elevation have provided the only suitable places for year-around stable human occupation for millennia (Aikens and Rhee, 1992, Aikens et al., 2009 and Chard, 1974). By the early Middle Holocene, people of the related and temporally overlapping Malyshevo and Kondon cultures (∼7000–4700 cal BP) were making pottery and collecting, fishing, and hunting along the Lower Amur River while living in sedentary and substantial semi-subterranean houses. The largest of these were about 150–180 m2 in floor area and contained Amylase interior storage pits as much as 2.5 m in diameter. To

the south in Primorye are known the somewhat earlier but comparable selleck chemicals Rudnaya Pristan (8600–8265 cal BP) and Chertovy Vorota (7650–7225 cal BP) sites, both with substantial pit houses and diverse cultural inventories. The diverse remains of mammals, birds, fishes, shellfishes, nuts, and acorns preserved in Chertovy Vorota, a dry cave site, indicate the breadth of the regional resource base. As in Korea, sites of the Russian Far East also increasingly document the presence of millets (Zhushchikhovskaya, 2006). Eastward across the Sea of Japan the Jomon people practiced patterns of subsistence and settlement similar to those just described, but there have also been found a number of impressively large Early and Middle Jomon (∼6000–5000 cal BP) sites containing both small nuclear family-sized houses and much larger rectangular buildings of public importance. It is now well-demonstrated that the flourishing and diversified Early Jomon economy of Japan also included, as previously described for the Korean Chulmun case, the management or cultivation of millets, azuki bean, soybean, and beefsteak plant (Perilla frutescens), all native plants still cultivated today ( Crawford, 1997, Crawford, 2006, Crawford, 2008, Crawford, 2011b and Lee, 2011).