Close to Beijing in China is the cave system of Zhoukoudian, alternatively spelled as Choukoutien. These caves, called the Dragon Bone caves (where have we heard that before?), have been excavated by archaeologists since 1921. The site was inhabited as long as 700.000 years ago as determined from the fossils found of Homo Erectus, the most famous of which was dubbed Peking Man. In the cave called the Upper Cave remains of Archaic Homo Sapiens, Early Modern Humans, have been found as well as a variety ornaments. Estimated age of these fossils has been set to around 30.000 years old. The combination of the fossils, their dates and location support the theory that Homo Sapiens in the area could have taken advantage of the land-bridge that connected Japan to the mainland of Korea some 15.000 years ago during the glacial period.
These people then started what is now known as the Jomon culture around 12.000 years ago. Eventually the Yayoi people coming from China displaced the Jomon culture. Modern Japanese are descended from both Yayoi and Jomon but the ancestry of the Ainu is still being researched and debated. These Ainu, that have lived in Japan and also in Sakhalin, that’s now part of Russia for thousands of years are the focus of this second instalment. The Ainu do not look like the average Japanese or Asian person. In fact they may not belong to the Mongoloid race at all. For a long time the Ainu have been a marginalised culture and officially they were not even recognized by the Japanese government as an indigenous people until 2008.
When genetic testing was performed on them it was discovered that they belonged to Y-haplogroup D.
It is found today at high frequency among populations in Tibet, the Japanese archipelago, and the Andaman Islands, though curiously not in India. The Ainu of Japan and the Jarawa and Onge of the Andaman Islands are notable for possessing almost exclusively Haplogroup D chromosomes, although Haplogroup C chromosomes also occur among the Ainu at a frequency of approximately 10%, similar to the Japanese.Not wanting to turns this into a paper on genetics I’ll not delve further into that specific side of things here, but it should illustrate that Ainu are rather unique and present a problem in determining their ancestry that has not yet been settled. There is a fair amount of information to be found on it however, if you feel like untangling the DNA strands.
Most of the pictures here of the Ainu are taken between 1880 to 1930. In the time when westerners came upon them while travelling around Japan and became intrigued by tales of strange, extremely hairy folk living on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. They don't however have inordinate hair growth, the males simply stop shaving after a certain age. Rumours and superstition probably took care of the rest. The Ainu had been living in a manner that had gone virtually unchanged for millennia. Aside from perhaps the addition of trading and some domestication of animals and metal tools their mode of life was like that of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people. But what has also carried over from those times to the present is their mythology, and the central character of that is the bear.
“Particularly instructive and well reported is the instance of bear cult of the Ainu of Japan, a Caucasoid race that entered and settled Japan centuries earlier than the Mongoloid Japanese, and are confined today to the northern islands, Hokkaido and Sakhalin--the latter now, of course, in Russian hands. These curious people have the sensible idea that this world is more attractive than the next, and that godly beings residing in that other, consequently, are inclined to come pay us visits. They arrive in the shapes of animals, but, once they have donned their animal uniforms, are unable to remove them. They therefore cannot return home without human help. And so the Ainu do help--by killing them, removing and eating the uniforms, and ceremonially bidding the release visitors bon voyage.”Joseph Campbell, Myths to live by – p.33
A great many rituals are, or were originally, intended to appease the gods or at least waylay their wrath or vengeance. The Ainu beliefs have some similarities with the Shinto (Way of the Gods) religion of Japan. ‘Ainu’ means human, as opposed to ‘kamui’ (compare to Shintos kami) which means spirit. Everything that is not 'ainu' is thus 'kamui', so there are kamui of nature, animals, plants and objects. In the Shinto religion reverence for life and paying proper respect to all things spiritual is of great importance. The same we find here in the Ainu with this wonderfully complex yet basic ritual. What this ritual and its accompanying belief allow for is that they are no longer just killing sacred life and damning themselves in the process of survival. Instead they are performing a service of reciprocal nature to the animal. What was at some stage guilt or fear of retribution is transformed into a life-affirming ceremony where the victim is now the sacrifice as well as the deity, he is both dinner and the guest of honor.
Now while I wish I came up with that all on my own, I took a page from the book of Joseph Campbell, literally. So here is him filling you in on the rest of it.
“We have a number of detailed accounts of the ceremonials, and even now one may have the good fortune to witness such an occasion. The bears are taken when still cubs and are raised as pets of the captor's family, affectionately nursed by the womenfolk and allowed to tumble about with the youngsters. When they have become older and a little too rough, however, they are kept confined in a cage, and when the little guest is about four years old, the time arrives for him to be sent home. The head of the household in which he has been living will prepare him for the occasion by advising him that although he may find the festivities a bit harsh, they are unavoidably so and kindly intended. "Little divinity," the caged little fellow will be told in a public speech, "we are about to send you home, and in case you have never experience one of these ceremonies before, you must know that it has to be this way. We want you to go home and tell your parents how well you have been treated here on earth. And if you have enjoyed your life among us and would like to do us the honor of coming to visit again, we in turn shall do you the honor of arranging for another bear ceremony of this kind." The little fellow is quickly and skillfully dispatched. His hide is removed with head and paws attached and arranged upon a rack to look alive. A banquet is then prepared, of which the main dish is a chunky stew of his own meat, a lavish bowl of which is placed beneath his snout for his own last supper on earth; after which, with a number of farewell presents to take along, he is supposed to go happily home.Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By p.33-34
Now a leading theme, to which I would call attention here, is that of the invitation to the bear to return to earth. This implies that in the Ainu view there is no such thing as death. And we find the same thought expressed in the final instructions delivered to the departed in the Ainu rites of burial. The dead are not to come back as haunts or possessing spirits, but only by the proper natural course, as babies. Moreover, since death alone would be no punishment for an Ainu, their extreme sentence for serious crimes is death by torture.
A second essential idea is that of the bear as a divine visitor whose animal body has to be "broken" (as they say) to release him for return to his other-worldly home. Many edible plants, as well as hunted beasts, are believed to be visitors of this kind; so that the Ainu, killing and eating them, are doing them no harm, but actually a favor. There is here an obvious psychological defense against the guilt feelings and fears of revenge of a primitive hunting and fishing folk whose whole existence hangs upon acts of continual merciless killing. The murdered beasts and consumed plants are thought of as willing victims; so that gratitude, not malice, must be the response of their liberated spirits to the "breaking and eating" of their merely provisional material bodies.”
Some other important facts to mention are that the Ainu consider the bear to be a mountain god which has led some to argue that this may have been why the cave bear skulls are found high in the mountains as well. Furthermore the Ainu preserve all the skulls of the sacrificed bears, so too we have seen in the caves of Europe, but here they are put up for display on poles. Also during the bear feast the goddess of Fire, Fuji, is invited to join the celebrations and in the Neanderthal caves as well as those of Zhoukoudian, fire hearths been found.
There is one final interesting connection with the Ainu and bears. The Ainu brought a breed of dog with them which is known the Ainu-ken but the Japanese call it Hokkaido-Ken. This dog has been with the Ainu since their arrival in Japan and is important enough to them to receive the same burial a human gets.
You would not say it by looking at it but this dog has the ability to take down brown bears, it manages to do this by climbing on the bear’s back and then biting down into its neck until it leaves or possibly dies. It also helps the Ainu with catching salmon.
To summarise: between the Neanderthals and CroMagnons of Europe and the Ainu of Japan I think there is a fair amount of material available to support the notion that mythology and mankind developed side by side from the beginning. There exists of course a great variety of ancient mythologies, but few (that I can think of) that date as far back as that of the cult of the bear.
Thank you for posting this. It is amazing to think that while the race and time period shift, relics of the ancient human spirit can continue to exist in various out-of-the-way places -- and thus provide us with critical links to our past as a species. You've done a valuable service by posting this material, and I gratefully thank you.
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