The World Seen with New Eyes

From 1945 on, a tendency appeared in American historical scholarship to replace the theory of Asian cultural origins, which European scholarship in Germany and France had long explained, with a theory of Mesopotamian and European cultural origins. Recently, with the development of genetic genealogy, the theory of the African origin of humankind has encouraged this tendency still further. Theories based on material evidence from archaeological excavations in Europe and Southwest Asia, together with political theories of history meant to justify colonialism, reinforced the present scholarly trend even more. Asia, lacking scholarly activity amid war and poverty, had no capacity to explain its own history.

The descendants of Lucy, who began to stand up and walk on two feet two million years ago, are said to have been called Homo sapiens. The Paleolithic culture of China began well over a million years before the time when Peking Man lived. It has been confirmed that Yuanmou Man, excavated in Yuanmou County in Yunnan Province, was already living 1.7 million years ago, and Lantian Man, excavated at Lantian in Shaanxi Province, was active about 600,000 years ago.

Peking Man of East Asia, from 500,000 years ago, excited the scholarly world because, unlike Java Man of the same stage, he was excavated in nearly complete condition — but in the turmoil of the Second World War the remains vanished and became a worldwide mystery. In the same stratum as Peking Man were found burned bones, a great many bones of animals such as deer, rhinoceros, tigers and hyenas, and man-made stone tools. They lived in a much warmer climate than today, using tools they made themselves and hunting much larger beasts. They were using fire in cave homes made by nature, and the use of fire was humankind's first step in growth — together with the use of tools, a very important advance in the history of human development.

People were terribly afraid of lightning and natural fire, but gradually came to be able to use it actively in their lives. Fire kept out the fierce beasts that threatened their survival while they slept at night and protected humans from the encroaching cold; and once they began to cook their food, the human body grew sturdier and the brain began to develop further. While the modern humans who began in East Africa grew up in Africa, warm as a mother's bosom, eating the food nature supplied as a baby drinks its mother's milk, they did venture out along the waterways to other continents; but, like Peking Man, they could not adapt for long to climate change, and their bloodlines did not continue.

As shown in "new genetic evidence reveals clues to the first human journeys," modern humans appeared a mere 100,000 years ago. As yet without language, communicating through sounds, facial expressions and gestures, they began to move along the sea routes eastward toward the rising sun. Seeking places with abundant food where they could sleep safely at night, they kept moving along the waterways. Around 50,000 years ago they reached Southeast Asia, and as they settled in places with a mild living environment and abundant resources, clan societies and villages formed and language began to develop. When they reached East Asia, for the first time they faced winter, the season of death.

The experience of humankind overcoming nature took place in East Asia, as a seafaring people challenged nature's winter. The peoples of the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria and Mongolia became the first pioneers of modern humankind, accustomed to the discipline of alternating summer and winter. The artificial life of modern people who had overcome nature began in East Asia, out of an animal-like life dependent on nature. From then on, human culture and civilization began in the temperate zones with four seasons. The culture and civilization of East Asia was passed on to the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe as the ice age thawed, and passed on as the culture and civilization of the native peoples of the North and South American continents, who were East Asia's blood kin.

Genghis Khan, who conquered the world from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, was feared by every conquered nation as the wolf that runs across the steppe. In the Dark Ages of medieval times, Europeans for the first time came to know East Asia on the other side of the globe. As recorded in Marco Polo's Travels (Divisament dou monde), in 1274 he arrived at Shangdu (上都, in the south of today's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region), where Kublai Khan, Emperor Shizu of the Yuan (元) dynasty, had his summer palace. Staying in Yuan China for 17 years, he traveled not only to its capital Dadu (大都, Beijing) but through Shanxi (山西), Shaanxi (陝西), Sichuan (四川), Yunnan (雲南), Hebei (河北), Shandong (山東), Jiangsu (江蘇), Zhejiang (浙江) and Fujian (福建). While serving as an official in Yangzhou (揚州), he joined a princess's escort and, passing through Sumatra, Malaya, Sri Lanka and Malabar in southwestern India, returned to his hometown of Venice in 1295. The tales of the East's immense wealth and abundance were more than enough to stir Europeans' curiosity and appetite for exploration.

Europe saw Genghis Khan's firecrackers and came to invent the gun, and by learning Genghis Khan's cannon, Napoleon marched all the way to Africa. They began to seize the lands of native peoples who shot bows. The present world map was made, and human history was told as though it had begun in the Mediterranean. It has long been said that history is the record of the winners. Because I wanted to see the record of the losers, I came to look with new eyes for the facts hidden in the shadows, and I began to write this essay in order to share a view of history suited to a new age.

Seeing that from the Neolithic age the Korean Peninsula and China's east coast had high population density, fine religious culture and metal civilization, and the possibility that they were connected by ocean voyages to the South American continent and to Africa, I came to see world history with new eyes. The new view of world history that I now want to explain in a little more detail is not an academic paper. Based on an architect's common sense, grounded in comprehensive facts and filling in unconfirmed parts as far as possible, I set out the thoughts and imaginings of an architect's eye and write them down like an essay.

If we compare the history of humankind to one person's lifetime, it shows the process by which a single cell evolves into a higher organism in the mother's womb. When a baby is born it begins to crawl on all fours, runs about on two feet, sings aloud and dances, and then begins to talk. I want to talk about how far humankind has grown from that age, what age it is at now, and what kind of life will continue for the rest of its years in the future.

Until now, world history — content researched and published from the ideology of white supremacy, ever since European nations invaded Asia, Australia and the North and South American continents — has been taught to the children and young people of the world. Scholars who went along with it feared leaving their conservative position, so whenever someone raised the original common sense that human culture began in Southeast Asia, they tended to dismiss them as old-fashioned Orientalists. But if we look at world history before Genghis Khan, we can clearly see that East Asia led human civilization and culture.

Scholars who respect common sense still infer today, on the basis of comprehensive scholarly data, that the culture and civilization of high antiquity began in China and India and later came to Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. If we look at the origins of India's religious culture, we see that Hinduism and Buddhism arose along the Ganges River in the east. The Indo-Aryans who ruled northern India for thousands of years BC were very likely Central Asians from China. It is only reasonable that the population boom brought by agricultural life in Southeast Asia moved population from the Ganges to the Indus. The culture of the Sumerian people in Mesopotamia also has much in common that links it to East Asia, and the culture of Africa's Nile basin is also linked to East Asian culture with mutual commonalities to be seen — the same phenomenon as the way the Pacific coast cultures of South America are linked to East Asia and show mutual commonalities.

Human history has been passed from one end to the other in big waves and small waves mixed together, rising and falling. When small waves that arose locally gathered into a big wave, the big wave carried far, far away. The flow of human civilization and culture is the result of maintaining continuity; it does not appear from small local mutations alone. Human civilization and culture are not small waves that appear locally but the result of big waves that have traveled from afar.

The Genetic Position of East Asia

Now is the time to move beyond explaining history by relying on records — to begin from genetic history, then observe archaeological history, and then look at recorded history, for a more comprehensive and rational explanation. The most recently published history of the world distribution of humankind through genetics (Evolution's Genetic Footprints) was published by Cavalli-Sforza's DNA research team. Paul Slopek, who serialized its content in the Chicago Tribune in 1998, received the Pulitzer Prize. The article on Prehistoric Migrations published in Scientific American magazine in July 2008 presented "new genetic evidence reveals clues to the first human journeys," and National Geographic publicized it widely. But because of the doubtful reaction of conservative historians in America and Europe, it suddenly tucked its tail away and went quiet. Still, its content was more than enough to give an opportunity to revive a rational picture that had long been accepted.

Some scholars deny the continuity of history and assert independent mutations. Such exceptions may arise from minor, partial inventions, but the flow of history is the result of long evolution, like the life of living things; just as there can be no such thing as mutant life appearing from nowhere, every event in human history is linked by a chain of cause and effect.

According to genetic genome research reports, modern humankind began in Africa around 10,000 years ago and reached Southeast Asia around 50,000 years ago. Archaeological excavation data support this. They show that people reached the North American continent 40,000 years ago. It seems that modern humans first challenged winter around the Korean Peninsula, overcame nature around 50,000 years ago, and began to grow accustomed to inland life in the Manchurian region. The modern humans who left Africa challenged winter everywhere on the Asian continent, but all failed, because there was no abundant food supply as there was in a maritime life. But the challenge in East Asia made overcoming nature possible, because there was the sea and a constant population. As the seafaring people adapted and changed into an inland people, they migrated to Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Eastern Europe. It shows that afterward, around 35,000 years ago, the modern humans of Asia dispersed across Eurasia.

The nineteenth-century English physician Dr. J. Langdon Down called patients with the symptoms of degenerative syndrome (Down syndrome) "Mongolism." This was because Dr. Down found in the appearance of East Asian people the immature look of early modern humankind — because the appearance of patients with this degenerative syndrome (Down syndrome), found in common among all the world's peoples, resembled Mongolian people. Clearly, the East Asians, the humankind of 50,000 years ago, differ in appearance from the people of Southwest Asia or Europe of 35,000 years ago. They have faces with narrow eyes, high cheekbones and small noses, and their tooth forms differ too. It seems to be against this historical background that the facial and dental structures of the people of Vietnam, Taiwan, eastern China, Japan, Mongolia, Tibet, Eastern Europe, Siberia and elsewhere carry the characteristics of Mongolism, older than any other people in the world. They are understood to have preserved the appearance of the immature humankind of 50,000 years ago without any great change until now. They seem to be the people who began settled life on Earth earlier than anywhere else in the world, and who began culture and civilization early as well.

Europe, northern Siberia and the far north of North America were first exposed to the living range of modern humans around 20,000 years ago, when the glaciers were cleared away by climate warming. After that, while East Asians advanced as far as Turkey, Hungary and Finland, it seems they had already developed the passage that is today's Silk Road, beginning on the Korean Peninsula and connecting to the Mediterranean. Around the turn of the era, the Huns continued migrating into Western Europe and pressed upon Rome, and a thousand years later Genghis Khan and his descendants ruled the Eurasian continent because they possessed the passage by which to rule the world.

With the recent development of archaeology in Japan, Korea and China, according to artifacts excavated in the 1970s and 1980s, the oldest relics of East Asian culture found so far are being excavated around the Liao River, at the northern end of the Yellow Sea coast. In 1987, at Xiaohexi village northwest of Chifeng City on the upper Liao River, a face made of clay and many artifacts were introduced as the Xiaohexi culture of 7000–6500 BC, a culture 3,000 years older than the Southwest Asian culture excavated so far (4000 BC). It is 2,000 years older than the Yellow River civilization (黃河文明). The Yellow River civilization (黃河文明), too, is a civilization raised by the Han people [the Korean people] (韓民族), before the Chinese Han, who highly developed calendrical science (曆法), astronomy and geography, medicine, law, and the life of food, clothing and shelter in the Central Plains (中原) and the Yellow River (黃河江) basin. The Neolithic pottery culture of East Asia was passed along the coastlines to the Americas and the Mediterranean, and when Greece reached the height of its pottery culture, East Asia had already reached the height of its metal culture. (Photographs of Greek pottery and Shang dynasty bronzes.) In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period (c. 550 BCE), coins inscribed with writing were in circulation.

As East Asia passed through the Paleolithic age of following the sun god on the Korean Peninsula, relics of ancestor religion and celestial religion appear from 8,000 years ago. By the late Neolithic, 3,000 years ago, it experienced a great change that already reached the Iron Age. In the Neolithic generation, life began with the use of plain (undecorated) pottery and bronze tools. Pottery culture reached its height in the late period of ancient culture, and around the tenth century Goryeo celadon was mass-produced.

If we observe the world's religions, the Homo sapiens of Africa, migrating east at every dawn in search of the sun's house and watching the moon and stars in the sky, formed the early beginnings of celestial and nature religion; and on reaching Southeast Asia, forming clan societies and village societies, they formed the early beginnings of ancestor religion. Just as the roots of the world's languages are gathered in Southeast Asia, the language of modern humankind began in Southeast Asia around 60,000 years ago and then reached East Asia around 50,000 years ago. It seems that a social form of language took shape in a primitive society that fought, sang and danced. From 30,000 years ago,
primitive forms of religion such as nature religion, celestial religion and ancestor religion seem to have taken shape.

Village societies grew into the form of feudal states or city-states, and when empires were established, Confucian scriptures such as East Asia's Analects and Book of Changes were published. Seeing that India's Hinduism and East Asia's nature religions have much in common, it seems that East Asia's religious forms were at some point passed on to South Asia — because the culture and civilization of the tropics follow a trend after it has begun in the temperate zones. The religion and philosophy of the feudal states that began in East Asia were passed on to eastern India, and around 600 BC on the Ganges River in eastern India an imperial religion — namely Buddhism — was born, which led on to the Judaism, Christianity and Islam of Southwest Asia, and on to the Catholicism of Eastern Europe.

The Magi from the East who came when Jesus was born hint at the origin of Christianity coming from the east. The many Buddhist forms to be seen in the order of Catholic worship support this connection. While imperial religion was formed in eastern India and passed on to western India and East Asia, Greek kings of the Mediterranean came to Buddhist temples in India and China and trained as Buddhist monks. The record that they learned Asian philosophy and culture at that time and took it home is stated clearly in the Buddhist records of India and China, but European scholars simply turn away from it.

With the world's religions beginning from East Asia's Taoism and reaching Western Europe's Protestantism, the wave of East Asian culture reached Western Europe over 2,000 years. Religious history, too, shows the process by which world culture and civilization began in East Asia, crossed the Asian and European continents, and were passed on to Western Europe. Taoist culture on the Korean Peninsula has deep roots in Goguryeo culture and left many remains in Goguryeo tombs. As for Buddhist culture: under King Dongseong, Baekje occupied the Northern Wei in Shanxi Province, and the Northern Wei halted work on the Buddhist Yungang Grottoes and moved to the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang, south of the Yellow River. Around this time (494), the Buddhist culture of the Northern Wei was passed on to Baekje at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, and later to Silla and Japan.

Throughout its long history, Japan has been a people of the Korean Peninsula — a political and cultural sphere of the Korean Peninsula, founded when political forces from the peninsula migrated there. When Genghis Khan occupied the Korean Peninsula and brought in continental culture, Japan was isolated from continental influence with the help of the divine wind (kamikaze), and so it has preserved the old culture of the Korean Peninsula well to this day. The Japanese language has the same sentence structure as Korean, differing only slightly in the pronunciation of words. Japanese writing, too, appears to preserve well the form of ancient Korean writing that used Chinese characters.

Scholars say that the modern civilization of humankind dates from the twelfth century, when Genghis Khan of East Asia unified Asia and Europe. As we see in Marco Polo's records, Europe then came to know East Asia and opened its eyes to the world. By learning the firecracker Genghis Khan used (gunpowder packed into bamboo and exploded), Europe came to invent the gun. Seeing Genghis Khan's cannon, European nations made cannons too. They learned China's compass, saw the Ming dynasty's maritime maps, and developed their navigational technology. Just as Genghis Khan conquered Europe, European nations invaded Asia. Armies that fired guns attacked nations whose soldiers carried bows and arrows on their shoulders and spears in their hands, seized their land, and made the present world map.

Europeans bought and sold Africans as slaves. The invasion of white people, who despised the languages and native cultures of the regions they conquered, has dominated the world. How miserably the native peoples of America were driven from their living spaces, and the suffering endured by Black people sold as slaves and by native peoples robbed of their homelands, will be remembered forever as wounds of human history.

Through the First and Second World Wars, the nations of the world drew closer and the Earth kept growing smaller. Humankind's violence has robbed wild animals of their living spaces, and the Earth's pollution is racing down the road to humankind's self-destruction. At such a moment, coming to see human history with new eyes and thinking about the future of humankind is an effort to find the inevitable path. The method is to think of the history of humankind by likening it to one person's lifetime.

The secret of a person's birth, kept in a mother's womb, is the answer to understanding the past of humankind on Earth. A single egg receives the sperm that arrived first, having beaten hundreds of millions of competitors, becomes a multicellular being, and from the form of a microorganism takes the shape of a small worm. It takes the shape of a fish, the shape of a reptile with a tail and four legs, and then the shape of a baby; it swims immersed in bodily fluid, comes out of the mother's body, breathes air for the first time and cries aloud. It moves by twisting its body. It crawls on all fours and at last stands on two feet and walks. This was the evolutionary process of humankind in the past. This is the theory of evolution; it is science and the common sense of the modern person.

Christianity, following the Bible, tries to deny it, but modern people, if they separate the languages of science, art and religion and also divide their ways of thinking into these three, should be able to stop the miserable and immature wars of religion we have now. The human religious way of thinking began when we received our mother's love and lived depending on our mother. Then, in humankind's babyhood, we acquired the emotions of higher animals, and there followed a time when, not yet knowing how to speak, we sang and danced and lived by artistic sense. Only when we were exposed to the social life of family and neighbors, learned language and acquired the capacity for logical, rational thought did we come to know science — this is the growth process of humankind. Modern people must reach, as soon as possible, the state of understanding reason, emotion and spirit separately and not confusing them.

Southeast Asia is where the world's largest population lives together, with the oldest history and the greatest number of languages gathered; and because Southeast Asia is the birthplace of religion arising from life and the birthplace of culture arising from emotion, the influence of human activity that began there was passed through Southwest Asia to Africa and Europe, and through East Asia to the Americas. Humankind left Africa, moved east along the southern coastline of the Asian continent, and in Southeast Asia settled along the coastline at river mouths where transport was convenient and the land fertile, and began living in family and village units. I imagine that the climate and natural conditions of Southeast Asia made it a nest on Earth with every condition needed by a growing, childhood-age humankind, and the region with the fastest rate of population growth.

According to "Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer 1998," in archaeologists' recent excavation reports, the remains of agricultural products in Thailand date to 15,000 years ago, remains of rice farming are traced to 9,000 years ago, and bronze artifacts in Vietnam go back 6,000 years. The round millstone that grinds grain, strips its husks and makes flour — when you feed dry grain between the upper stone and the lower stone and turn it, husked flour is pushed out from between the pressed stones, so it is also called a dorikkae — was in use 26,000 years ago among the ancient artifacts of the Indonesian islands, and until recently was an essential of daily life among the nations of Southeast Asia and the native peoples of North and South America. These farming tools are said to have been used in Egypt and Southwest Asia 12,000 years ago.

European nations, having conquered the world's continents and steeped in the ideology of white supremacy, think of the Mediterranean culture of Egypt and Greece as though it were the beginning of world culture, and, because modern humankind was born in Africa, they mistakenly believe that the culture and civilization of modern humankind in Southwest Asia is the oldest. But when we see that East Asia is the region that raised dolmens and began metal culture in the Neolithic age, and that when Greece was making and using pottery, East Asia had already gone ahead into bronze metal culture, it makes us study world history anew.