•  3625
    弥生時代中期における戦争:人骨と人口動態の関係から(Prehistoric Warfare in the Middle Phase of the Yayoi Period in Japan : Human Skeletal Remains and Demography)
    with Tomomi Nakagawa, Kohei Tamura, Yuji Yamaguchi, Naoko Matsumoto, and Takehiko Matsugi
    Journal of Computer Archaeology 1 (24): 10-29. 2019.
    It has been commonly claimed that prehistoric warfare in Japan began in the Yayoi period. Population increases due to the introduction of agriculture from the Korean Peninsula to Japan resulted in the lack of land for cultivation and resources for the population, eventually triggering competition over land. This hypothesis has been supported by the demographic data inferred from historical changes in Kamekan, a burial system used especially in the Kyushu area in the Yayoi period. The present stu…Read more
  •  2928
    文化進化を研究するとはどういうことか
    文化情報学 1 (10): 38-46. 2015.
    This paper reviews current situations of cultural evolutionary studies.
  •  1249
    人骨から見た暴力と戦争: 国外での議論を中心に
    with Tomomi Nakagawa
    Journal of the Japanese Archaeological Association 44 65-77. 2017.
    Violence and warfare in prehistory have been intensely discussed in various disciplines recently. Especially, some controversies are found on whether prehistoric hunter-gatherers had been already engaged in inter-group violence and warfare. Japanese archaeology has traditionally argued that warfare has begun in the Yayoi period with an introduction of full-fledged agriculture though people in the Jomon period, when subsistence system had been mainly hunting and gathering, had not been involved i…Read more
  •  1003
    This paper examines the theory of natural pedagogy theory especially by focusing on its explanation of overimitation.
  •  868
    Violence and warfare in prehistoric Japan
    with Tomomi Nakagawa, Kohei Tamura, Yui Arimatsu, Naoko Matsumoto, and Takehiko Matsugi
    Letters on Evolutionary and Behavioral Science 8 (1): 8-11. 2017.
    The origins and consequences of warfare or largescale intergroup violence have been subject of long debate. Based on exhaustive surveys of skeletal remains for prehistoric hunter-gatherers and agriculturists in Japan, the present study examines levels of inferred violence and their implications for two different evolutionary models, i.e., parochial altruism model and subsistence model. The former assumes that frequent warfare played an important role in the evolution of altruism and the latter s…Read more
  •  809
    Correction to: ‘Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period’
    with Kohei Tamura, Yui Arimatsu, Tomomi Nakagawa, Naoko Matsumoto, and Takehiko Matsugi
    Biology Letters 2016 20160847. 2016.
    Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or notwarfare among prehistoric hunter–gathererswas common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for…Read more
  •  354
    Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period
    with Kohei Tamura, Yui Arimatsu, Tomomi Nakagawa, Naoko Matsumoto, and Takehiko Matsugi
    Biology Letters 1 (12): 20160028. 2016.
    Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter – gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure…Read more
  •  311
    文化進化の考古学
    with Takehiko Matsugi and Nobuhiro Minaka
    勁草書房. 2017.
    The book includes some examples of cultural evolutionary studies on archaeological remains in Japan.
  •  273
    A quantitative history of Japanese archaeology and natural science
    Japanese Journal of Archaeology 6 (1): 3-22. 2018.
    This study examines the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science through a quantitative analysis of the two most authoritative archaeological journals and two other relevant journals in Japan. First, although previous studies have emphasized the impact of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo on the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, results of the present study suggest that its impact has been more limited than previously assumed. Second, while …Read more
  •  175
    The evolution of altruism in human societies has been intensively investigated in social and natural sciences. A widely acknowledged recent idea is the “parochial altruism model,” which suggests that inter- group hostility and intragroup altruism can coevolve through lethal intergroup conflicts. The current article critically examines this idea by reviewing research relevant to intergroup conflicts in human evolutionary history from evolutionary biology, psychology, cultural anthropology, and ar…Read more
  •  174
    ナチュラル・ペダゴジ一理論の行方
    ベビーサイエンス 18 50. 2019.
    The paper is a critical comment on Okumura & Kanakogi (2019).
  •  137
    The present article examines the theoretical foundations of Japanese archaeology epistemologically. The section 2 epistemologically examines excavation reports as one of the foundational works in Japanese archaeology, i.e., what excavation reports are and should be. It is argued that with a lack of epistemological justification of excavation reports, their epistemological status is highly puzzling. The section 3 also epistemologically and methodologically examines types or typology as one of the…Read more
  •  137
    Population pressure and prehistoric violence in the Yayoi period of Japan
    with Tomomi Nakagawa, Kohei Tamura, Yuji Yamaguchi, Naoko Matsumoto, and Takehiko Matsugi
    Journal of Archaeological Science 132 105420. 2021.
    The causes of prehistoric inter-group violence have been a subject of long-standing debate in archaeology, an- thropology, and other disciplines. Although population pressure has been considered as a major factor, due to the lack of available prehistoric data, few studies have directly examined its effect so far. In the present study, we used data on skeletal remains from the middle Yayoi period of the Japanese archipelago, where archaeologists argued that an increase of inter-group violence in …Read more
  •  127
    Cultural Identity and Intergroup Conflicts: Testing Parochial Altruism Model via Archaeological Data
    Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 32 75-87. 2023.
    The present research used archaeological data, i.e., the data obtained from kamekan jar burials in the Mikuni Hills of the northern Kyushu area in the Mid- dle Yayoi period, to test the parochial altruism model. This model argued that out-group hate and in-group favor coevolved via prehistoric intergroup conflicts. If this model is accurate, such an out-group hate and in-group favor could be re- flected in the archaeological remains, such as pottery making; the more frequent intergroup conflicts…Read more
  •  76
    Demic Diffusion of the Yayoi People in the Japanese Archipelago
    with Tomomi Nakagawa, Akihiro Kaneda, Koji Noshita, and Kohei Tamura
    Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science 14 (2). 2023.
    The present study examines the 3-dimensional data of human crania from the Yayoi period (800 BC to AD 250) of the Japanese archipelago by geometric morphometrics to investigate demic diffusion patterns. This is the first study on the Yayoi crania using their 3D data and geometric morphometrics with a much larger number of skeletal remains outside of the Kyushu regions than previous studies. The comparative results between the Jōmon and Yayoi samples show that the Yayoi people not only in the eas…Read more
  •  70
    The evolution of punishment
    Biology and Philosophy 27 (6): 833-850. 2012.
    Many researchers have assumed that punishment evolved as a behavior-modification strategy, i.e. that it evolved because of the benefits resulting from the punishees modifying their behavior. In this article, however, we describe two alternative mechanisms for the evolution of punishment: punishment as a loss-cutting strategy (punishers avoid further exploitation by punishees) and punishment as a cost-imposing strategy (punishers impair the violator’s capacity to harm the punisher or its genetic …Read more
  •  59
    Cultural evolution of ritual practice in prehistoric Japan: The kitamakura hypothesis is examined
    with Misato Maikuma
    Letters on Evolutuionay Behavioral Science 15 (1). 2024.
    Various disciplines, including evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, and psychology, have studied the evolution of rituals. Archaeologists have typically argued that burial practices are one of the most prominent manifestations of ritual practices in the past and have explored various aspects of burial practices, including burial directions. One of the important hypotheses on the cultural evolution of burial practices in Japan is the kitamakura hypothesis, which claims that burial dir…Read more
  •  51
    Ready to Teach or Ready to Learn: A Critique of the Natural Pedagogy Theory
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (4): 465-483. 2014.
    According to the theory of natural pedagogy, humans have a set of cognitive adaptations specialized for transmitting and receiving knowledge through teaching; young children can acquire generalizable knowledge from ostensive signals even in a single interaction, and adults also actively teach young children. In this article, we critically examine the theory and argue that ostensive signals do not always allow children to learn generalizable knowledge more efficiently, and that the empirical evid…Read more
  •  35
    Although there are many historical and philosophical analyses of evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo), its development in the 1980s, when many individual or collective attempts to synthesize evolution and development were made, has not been examined in detail. This article focuses on some interdisciplinary studies during the 1980s and argues that they had important characteristics that previous historical and philosophical work has not recognized. First, we clarify how each set of studie…Read more