Regional variations in the demographic response to the arrival of rice farming in prehistoric Japan

Rice agriculture was brought to Japan during the first millennium BC by migrant communities of farmers from the Korean peninsula. Substantial geographic variation is observed in the uptake of this new subsistence economy, reflecting different forms of interaction between farmers and foragers. Here, the authors analyse a combination of settlement and radiocarbon data to determine the extent to which these different forms of interaction led to regional variations in population growth rate. Their results confirm the presence of different trajectories of growth, providing new insights into the diversity of demographic processes during the earliest stages of farming in Japan.