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Article: SITE OF DIG SHEDS CLUES ON ORIGINS OF JAPANESE LIFE.(News)
- Article from:
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- Article date:
- April 5, 1999
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When he was a boy, Tomihiro Yoshizaki used to dig for arrowheads in some strange mounds of earth outside this city in northern Japan.
Now those mounds have been excavated, resolving crucial mysteries about the ancient hunter-gatherers who lived here 5,000 years ago. Just one mystery remains: To what extent are Yoshizaki and other modern Japanese descended from those ancient people?
The origins of the Japanese people remain a much-debated puzzle, but part of it is being pieced together here on the vast archeological site near Aomori, 375 miles north of Tokyo. Local people like Yoshizaki, 45, had long known about the mounds and the artifacts. But they were ...