Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Jomon period is a prehistoric era in Japan lasting from approximately 14,000 BCE to 300 BCE. It is named after the cord-marked pottery characteristic of the culture, a term coined by American zoologist Edward S. Morse after he discovered pottery sherds in 1877. The period is divided into six phases: Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late, and Final.
Jomon pottery is among the oldest known ceramics in the world, with fragments dated to approximately 14,500 BCE found at the Odai Yamamoto I site in 1998. The pottery is significant because it was made by hunter-gatherers, demonstrating that ceramic production does not require settled agricultural societies. Archaeologists have classified Jomon pottery into roughly 70 distinct styles.
The Jomon people were a diverse hunter-gatherer and early agriculturalist population whose ancestors migrated from Northeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula, China, and Southeast Asia. Genetic analyses show that the modern Japanese population carries approximately 30% paternal ancestry from the Jomon, along with roughly 15% maternal and 10% autosomal Jomon contribution.
The Jomon people practiced early forms of plant cultivation, placing them between hunter-gatherers and full agriculturalists. Evidence includes arboriculture of lacquer and chestnut trees, cultivation of soybean and adzuki beans, and the presence of an apparently domesticated peach variety at Jomon sites dated to around 4,700-4,400 BCE. A genomic study found that all modern cultivated adzuki bean varieties descended from wild adzuki in eastern Japan.
The Jomon period ended around 300 BCE when it was succeeded by the Yayoi culture in most of Japan. In western Kyushu, Korean-type settlements began appearing around 900 BCE, bringing wet rice farming and bronze and iron metallurgy. At the close of the Jomon era, the local population declined sharply due to food shortages and environmental stress; examination of skeletal remains rules out warfare as the primary cause.
Jomon culture has seen a significant revival in modern Japan. A 2018 exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum drew 350,000 visitors, about three and a half times more than expected. Jomon cord-marking patterns have been applied to clothing, accessories, and tattoos in the early 21st century, and a movement to recreate ancient Jomon ceramic techniques using traditional bonfire firing began in the 1970s.