Introduction

The transition from the Jomon to the Yayoi period of the Japanese archipelago is an East Asian case of a hunter-gatherer to farmer transition. Drastic socio-cultural changes in subsistence, material culture and settlement structure occurred in the northern part of Kyushu around the 10th-8th centuries BC.

Simulation studies can be very useful for understanding the nature of this transition as we can examine various hypotheses with different parameters to see how separate combinations would lead to alternative socio-cultural situations over a long period of time, and examine the resulting insights using real archaeological data. Interpretation of what happened in this period differs among researchers due to different assumptions concerning migration, cultural transmission, and the rela­tionship between the two. As it is extremely difficult to calculate the long-term consequences of particular assumptions on genetic and cultural transmission, simulation can be a useful means for experimenting with particular sets of assumptions. However, simulation research remains undeveloped for this prehis­toric event, except for a series of publications concerning demographic change in

N. Matsumoto (is)

Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Okayamaa University,

Okayama, Japan

e-mail: naoko_m@cc.okayama-u.ac.jp

M. Sasakura

Department of Computer Science, Okayamaa University, Okayama, Japan

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 311

J.A. Barcelo and F.

Computational Social Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31481-5_11 terms of phenotypes (e.g., Hanihara 1987). An outline of these studies will be considered later.

The purpose of our research is not to replicate the actual processes of the Jomon- Yayoi transition, but to obtain useful insights regarding genetic and cultural transmission in order to construct a model explaining the prehistoric demographic and cultural dynamics involved. Such an effort is important, as our understanding of the socio-cultural process would remain intuitive without knowing about limits, patterns, and tendencies in dynamic relationships between population and culture.

How neolithic transitions spread has been the theme of active discussion in many parts of the world, among which the European case has been the target of the most intensive research. Whether neolithic expansions are driven mainly by demic or cultural diffusion is a major question to be answered in order to understand the transition process. Calibrated radiocarbon dates of the earliest Neolithic sites across Europe have made it possible to calculate the speed of that particular neolithic expansion. It has been demonstrated that the European Neolithic transition spread at a speed of about 1 km per year, and it has been recognized as indicating demic diffusion (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1971). On the other hand, the importance of cultural diffusion has also been pointed out (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1973, 1984; Fort 2012; Jerardino et al. 2004). Actually, archaeological evidence suggests that there can be various kinds of interactions between hunter-gatherers and farmers, and that the process of transition differs depending on the indigenous hunter-gatherers' population density and/or social complexity (Zvelebil 1986; Zvelebil and Lillie 2000).

The process of cultural transmission has recently been analyzed in an evolu­tionary framework, using such concepts as mutation, selection, and random drift. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) examined how cultural evolution and diversity are produced by various modes of transmission: parent-child, peer-peer, and tea­cher-student. What we try to examine in this paper is a kinship-based transmission in a realistic demographic situation, hoping it can expand our understanding of the relationship between genetic and cultural transmission, and also contribute to the study of the spread of agriculture.

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