1. Why All of Human Civilization Began in East Asia

It has recently been shown that the roots of humankind began in a single place, Africa. Human civilization, too, began in a single place. People do not want to believe such a story. But finding the truth and making it known is something all of us need. I discovered and came to know these facts through the research and field surveys I have carried out ever since 1961, when I began work on the restoration project of Namdaemun (Sungnyemun) Gate in Seoul under the guidance of Professors Kim Won-yong, Kim Jae-won, and Hwang Su-young.

In July 2008, genetic genealogists who trace the roots of the human family announced in Scientific American that modern humans left Africa 100,000 years ago and, following the coastal route, reached East Asia 50,000 years ago. At that time Europe and the North American continent lay under the ice of the Ice Age, where no one could live. Later, the modern humans who migrated from Africa across the Mediterranean to Europe seem to have become the white race, with blond hair and blue eyes, while our ancestors, who reached East Asia by way of Southeast Asia, seem to have become the yellow race.

Our ancestors who reached East Asia must have begun to look for ways to overcome and survive winter, the season of death among the four seasons. Preparing food and gathering firewood before winter came was the way to stay alive through the winter. From then on, adapting to the four seasons, they must have farmed from spring to autumn, found ways to store food, put away fermented foods such as liquor, kimchi, meju (fermented soybean blocks), and doenjang (soybean paste) as well as dried foods, and begun raising livestock such as chickens, pigs, and dogs. They must even have come to build the ondol room, which keeps heat through the winter with wood, charcoal, and coal and warms the floor all night long.

The way of life passing through food-rich Southeast Asia and the way of life of preparing for winter after reaching East Asia were clearly different. Only a life disciplined by the tasks and timing of each season could survive the winter. Surviving by farming and storing produce was the beginning of industrialization. Families and clans pooled their labor, forming organized communities and societies, and this led to population growth. It seems that the religious custom began of digging the earth to make reservoirs, piling the soil dug from the reservoirs into altars, and offering rites to heaven and to the spirits of ancestors. The custom of building earth mounds at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula seems to have spread along the coastal route to North America and Southeast Asia.

Earthenware (土器), made by firing clay, was used in East Asia from 10,000 years ago and is excavated from the sites of farming villages. Sumerian earthenware (土器) in Southwest Asia appears only from 5,000 years ago. Comb-pattern pottery, mass-produced in the high heat of coal fires, began on the Korean Peninsula and spread westward. Life without vessels meant picking food up off the ground like animals; life with vessels, storing food in them and eating from them, was the beginning of human civilization. Since East Asia has a great deal of bamboo, bamboo vessels must have been the habit that led to making earthenware vessels.

In the Neolithic period, the dolmen of the Korean Peninsula was an ancestral tomb in which a body was buried and kept under a single flat rock. Over time it developed into the dolmen form of two large upright stones topped by a flat rock. Dolmen culture left some 40,000 sites around the Korean Peninsula, and the remaining 40,000 or so are scattered along the coastal route through Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia and as far as Europe. It seems to have spread over a long period of time, starting on the Korean Peninsula and reaching as far as the island nation of Britain.

Among the relics excavated from Neolithic dolmens on the Korean Peninsula, bronze swords and tools, bronze mirrors, and ornaments were found for the first time. Metal smelted in coal fires, common throughout the northern Korean Peninsula and Manchuria, was the first sign of humanity passing from the Stone Age into the Metal Age. The metal civilization that began then became the mother of today's machine civilization. In farming and herding villages, earth mounds turned into stone tombs, and it seems people began to build stone-mound tombs (pyramids) by dressing the great rocks of the stone tombs with metal tools. Wheel culture also began in East Asia, including the waterwheel in rice farming, the wheel of the loom for making silk cloth, and the one-wheeled cart pushed by hand. We can see in the murals of Goguryeo tombs that the wooden wheels of oxcarts were replaced by iron wheels and that horse-drawn chariots (車馬) appeared.

The Records of the Grand Historian by the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian hints that before the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han empires there was an empire and civilization of the Huns (the Dongyi people of the Manchurian region). The Hongshan culture of Manchuria, which carved jade with metal tools, predated the Xia, Shang, and Egyptian cultures by 2,000 years. East Asian civilization, having overcome the season of winter 50,000 years ago, was carried to the Aztecs and Maya of the North and Central American continent as the Earth passed through its thaw 20,000 years ago, and was carried to Southwest Asia and Europe, becoming the mother of human civilization. East Asian religion was carried along the coastal route to eastern India, and the Buddhism of the Ganges River was carried to the Indus River, where kings of the Greek city-states trained and then returned home; six hundred years later, Christianity began in Southwest Asia. Just as the roots of the world's peoples began in a single place, Africa, the world's civilization also began in a single place, East Asia.

The population explosion in East Asia, with its agriculture, herding, and industrialization, turned clan societies into feudal states, and feudal states grew into kingdoms, and the competition to take the Central Plains of East Asia was fierce. East Asian metal tools brought revolutionary change to human life. Pit huts became wooden houses furnished with wooden furniture, and straw boats became wooden boats that crossed the waterways. People sailed the seas from the time they discovered magnetite among metal ores and obtained the compass, which is why the East Asian compass can be seen even in Peru in South America. The civilization of Egypt, with its horse-drawn chariots and stone-mound tombs (pyramids), is also East Asian civilization that flowed from East Asia along the coastal route. We come to understand that the Atlantis spoken of by the Greek philosopher Plato was East Asia.

The world's political and economic leadership, which passed from Europe to the United States in the twentieth century, is now crossing over to East Asia in the not-too-distant future, as humanity's metal civilization changes into an electronic civilization. The world still does not know that the Japanese language is nearly the same as Korean and that Japanese culture is the Baekje culture of the Korean Peninsula. Ever since Genghis Khan awakened medieval Europe and Marco Polo's Travels introduced East Asian civilization to the West, if we do not further reveal the truth of what this essay says and make it known to the world, whose task will it be?