Surviving Turbulent Times: Climate Change, Cultural Connections and Shifting Adaptations in Hokkaido-Sakhalin during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition

The Pleistocene-Holocene transition brought turbulent times to human societies confronted by rapid climatic fluctuations, shifts in
biogeographic zones and the flooding of continental shelves. While the disappearance of Doggerland’s inhabited landscapes under
the grey waters of the North Sea marks the culmination of these changes for European Archaeologists, our aim is this paper is to
draw parallels with Northeast Asia, where the islands of Hokkaido and Sakhalin once formed a major terrestrial extension of the vast
Eurasian landmass. During the LGM, this terrestrial corridor offered an “escape route” from the harsh glacial conditions of Siberia,
but as temperatures gradually warmed, prehistoric societies faced a growing subsistence crisis as landscapes flooded and faunal
resources declined. Our goal is to understand how these societies responded to a warming – yet frequently unstable – climate in an
ever-shrinking terrestrial world. Late Glacial warming witnessed to a brief expansion of Incipient Jōmon traditions into Hokkaido, cut
short by the Younger Dryas. As Holocene warming accelerated, a broader suite of innovations including house pits, plant use and pottery expanded across Sakhalin and Hokkaido. The onset of the 8.2 cal. BP cold event partly reversed this trend, and brought Siberian lithic traditions (Blade Arrow Culture) back down through Sakhalin and into Hokkaido, signalling the temporary return to more mobile
sub-arctic lifeways and a growing reliance on costal resources. Understanding human- and community-scale responses to these
major shifts is challenging because the region’s acidic soils mean that bone material is not preserved, other than at a few shell-midden sites in Hokkaido. At the same time, the region’s extended hunter-gatherer pottery traditions offer rich scope for undertaking biomolecular reconstruction of changing cooking practices across major cultural and environmental transitions. We report recent
results, examine remaining gaps in knowledge, and present ideas for future research.

Vasilevski, Alexander (World and Russian History, Sakhalin State University) - Kato, Hirofumi (GSI, Hokkaido University) - Grishchenko, Vyacheslav (Archaeological Museum, Sakhalin State University)