On the initial peopling of the Kuril island (to the discovery of the long barrows culture)

   In 2022, the journal “Archaeology, Ethnography and Anthropology of Eurasia” published the article “The Incipient Neolithic of the Kurile Islands: The Culture of Long Barrows”. It introduces new unique materials dated to the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. These are the first sources of such an early epoch in the archeology of the Kuril Islands. Moreover, they are so unusual that they do not fit into any regional archaeological taxonomy. There are no analogues to them either on the Amur, or on Sakhalin, or on Hokkaido. Based on the collected artifacts and dates, the authors identified a new era in the history of the Kuril Islands - the “Incipient Neolithic” (13.0-8.5 thousand cal BP) – and a new associated culture – the Long Barrows. The interpretation of new relics proposed by the authors radically changes our perceptions not only of the initial peopling of the Kuril Islands proper, but also of how the neolithization took place in the island part of the Far Eastern region as a whole. This prompted the preparation of a small analytical review, the main purpose of which is to understand how valid the concept proposed in the mentioned article is. Having compared the new materials with those already known in the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin and Hokkaido, we ultimately come to the conclusion that the new sources for the most part represent the epoch associated with the widespread establishment of the Neolithic way of life in the Sea of Japan area (settlements with semi-underground dwellings, ceramic production, jewelry) and corresponding to the boundary of the Boreal and Atlantic periods. As for the earlier dates, going back to the end of the Pleistocene and the very beginning of the Holocene, the data presented in the publication is not enough to understand them. So far, neither the “long barrows” themselves nor any other published finds can be consistently correlated with them.

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