Chapter 2: The Infancy of Humankind

The Beginning of Culture and Civilization

World culture began in the matrilineal society of Southeast Asia's gathering and farming life, and world civilization began in the competitive society of East Asia's farming and nomadic peoples, who had grown accustomed to a life of metal tools.

Because human instinct consists of the capacity to seek out and eat food and the capacity of men and women to associate, bear children and raise them, love became the source of culture, and the struggle for survival became the source of civilization. Primitive people, who dispersed fastest along the coastlines, depended on a gathering life and migrated in search of regions rich in natural food, and when the food supply dwindled with the seasons, they were used to a mobile life like migratory birds. Eating greens in summer, fruit in autumn, and seeds and roots in winter and spring, while catching and eating fish, shellfish and small animals, they ate both plants and meat. While matrilineal society continued for tens of thousands of years, centered on the instinct of the woman who loves her man and her children, the planting of seeds began agriculture, and the raising of small animals began domestic livestock.

In the past, European historians believed that the oldest cultures in the world were in China and India. But in the 1960s American scholars asserted that the source of world culture was in Southwest Asia, and recently, as it has come to be firmly believed on the basis of DNA research that humankind began in Africa, it has come to be regarded as a matter of course that human culture began in Southwest Asia, close to Africa.

After tens of thousands of years of a gathering life, people went from eating seeds to planting seeds and began to cultivate; and in the joy a mother's instinct to love her children found in plant life growing from the soil and in the animals they raised bearing and rearing their young, the settled life of matrilineal society began. In settled life, trees were among the most necessary living things for human life — fuel for fire, tools needed for living, and material for building houses.

Out of gratitude and fear toward the environment that protected the love of family that had protected one's own life, and that protected the family so that its lives could be sustained, religious rites began, and ceremonies of many forms, individual or collective — joyful rites, sorrowful rites, rites of anger and so on — became part of life. Religious rites wishing for good weather from the heavens, abundant harvests on the earth and good fortune for the family, and the cultural activities connected with them, began. The forms of Taoism and Hinduism, which held religious rites for all natural things — the sun, the moon, mountains, rivers, the sea, rocks, trees and so on — began. The Confucian rites of offering sacrifices to the spirits of parents, ancestors and society's leaders also firmly established their foundation as clan society grew.

This is because the knowledge of European and American scholars about East Asian culture is very limited. Because it relied on Western observation, it differs greatly from our own view of our culture. Through the First and Second World Wars, Asian nations were invaded, went through civil wars and turmoil, lived in poverty and want, and went through upheavals such as the elimination of scholars in China's Communist Cultural Revolution. During the Second World War, Japan's political distortion of history clouded the identity of Asian culture even further. In such a reality, the history and culture of Asia as seen by American and European scholars cannot help but be vague.

In step with the recent movements to see history correctly in Southeast Asia, including India, China and Korea, I hope that a movement to see world history correctly can also unfold. It was only in the 1990s that the scholarly world confirmed that the native peoples of the Americas migrated from East Asia from about 35,000 years ago. Moreover, comparing the native cultures of the Americas with East Asian culture and explaining what they have in common is introduced for the first time in this book.

I want to trace what contribution the stone-tool culture of East Asia made — raising dolmens and pyramids, accumulating astronomical knowledge, and developing religion — while the earliest of modern humankind's bloodlines, having appeared and made their way from Africa to East Asia, sent their descendants into the North and South American continents and into the Asian interior as far as Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Eastern Europe.

Because the Greek scholar Plato of the Mediterranean recorded that Greek culture came from Atlantis, European scholars and explorers are still searching for Atlantis today. I want to point out that Atlantis was in East Asia. As an architect, I compare archaeological plastic arts and architectural remains, and materials from before written records. I explain what the native cultures of the Americas have in common with the historical relics of East Asia's Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties over 2,000 years, and compare their customs. By explaining the possibility of a history connected from even longer ago, from 30,000 years ago, I want to show that the connection between East Asian and American cultures existed alongside the connection between Asia and Europe.

Then where did ancient civilization begin, and how did it continue down to the time of Genghis Khan? Because humankind is connected by blood (genealogy), if we first look at blood relationships, then look through archaeology, and then look at the recorded history of writing, a picture is drawn. When we view these three fields together, we easily see that humankind moved east from Africa, and easily see that culture and civilization moved from East Asia west to the Mediterranean and to the North and South American continents.

And I imagine it this way. From two million years ago, humankind, beginning to stand up and walk on two feet, grew up in Africa, warm as a mother's bosom, eating the food nature supplied as a baby drinks its mother's milk. Modern humans appeared a mere 100,000 years ago, and, as yet without language, communicating through sounds, facial expressions and gestures, they began to move along the sea routes eastward toward the rising sun. At first they stayed in the basins of the Tigris and Euphrates, then moved east again across the Indian Ocean, and around the time they passed the Indus and the Ganges, the climate was good and food abundant, so their population increased. At last, when they reached the many islands of Southeast Asia and reached Australia, it seems they occupied land where gathering food and hunting animals was easy and began to form villages as settled clan societies.

Just as animals seek food and eat all day long, people too began to seek out and store food as families, and just as animals find mates and protect their young, a collective atmosphere of attack and defense must have formed in human life too. On reaching Southeast Asia, the population must have increased further, language begun to develop, and a time begun of seeking out and storing the necessities of life harvested from sea and land.

Archaeologists say this was 50,000 years ago, and linguists say the roots of the world's languages are gathered in Southeast Asia. As they moved north along the Pacific coastline and came to settle in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins, their way ahead was blocked when they reached the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria. The Korean Peninsula blocked the way, and for the first time they took on the terrible winter season. The people who penetrated inland from here were the M174 lineage, and the people who passed the Yalu and Tumen Rivers of the Korean Peninsula, went through Siberia and reached the North American continent were the M130 lineage.

Splitting into M174 and M130, M174 appear to be the ancestors of the inland peoples leading on to Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet, and M130 appear to be the ancestors of the seafaring peoples who passed through Siberia and Alaska to reach North, Central and South America. In Korea, M174 people are called the ancestors of Goguryeo and M130 people the ancestors of Baekje. The roots of the East Asian peoples who overcame winter — developing many fermented foods such as kimchi, doenjang and liquor from 50,000 years ago, forming earth-pit dwellings and developing the ondol room with its warmed floor — must have ripened from this time. It seems that the great artery of human bloodlines divided here, and that humankind's first housekeeping had already begun in East Asia from around 50,000 years ago, before the world's other bloodlines multiplied on the Earth around 35,000 years ago. The M122 lineage, with the expansion of the Chinese Han out of Central Asia, migrated to China's east coast from 10,000 years ago, and at this time the M4 lineage dispersed into Southeast Asia.

In the ancestor religion of East Asian clan society, when parents died they were buried in the earth and a round grave was built of earth. That custom continues even now. Villagers dug reservoirs to store water and heaped up the dug earth to build great graves shaped like small hills, or made them into altars for sacrificing to heaven. The custom on the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula of digging ponds, building earth mounds and making great tombs is connected to the remains of some 3,000 earth mounds built along the banks of the Mississippi. The earth-mound culture passed along the coastlines can be seen in Western Europe in the region of Denmark. Archaeological excavations in North America show remains of human habitation from around 40,000 years ago.

Before the glaciers began to melt on European land 20,000 years ago and before the population of blond-haired, blue-eyed Western Europeans increased, East Asian culture had already extended into and grown on the North American continent and in the Mediterranean region. When we see what the customs of the native peoples of the Americas have in common with East Asian customs, we come to understand that the native peoples, including the Maya civilization of Central America's Yucatán Peninsula, are of East Asian blood and have interacted with East Asia over a long history, from before the Western European peoples appeared. On the Jusan ridge at Jisan-dong in Goryeong County, North Gyeongsang Province, on the Korean Peninsula, some 200 tombs of the kings and royal family of Daegaya spread along the ridgeline to form a magnificent sight. (Photo below)

A life adapted to the four seasons required the regular effort and discipline of preparing necessities such as food, clothing, housing and fuel before winter came. With metal tools they built large houses and large ships; wheels fitted with metal axles allowed the mass production of chariots that ran fast and far, and wagons were made to carry heavy loads, so that all industries flourished together with the transport industry. Magnetism was discovered and the iron-needle compass invented, so ocean navigation developed; paper was made, so written records flourished, and the exchange of information and the linking of records transcended the limits of place and time. As a large population lived on a broad and vast continent from tens of thousands of years earlier, all the inventions and discoveries of ancient society began in Southeast Asia and were then applied in the competitive society of East Asia. Because East Asia's farming and nomadic cultures had already spread across the whole temperate zone of Southeast Asia while Europe and the North American continent were going through the ice age, we can easily imagine that culture and civilization developed there tens of thousands of years ahead of any part of the other continents.