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Pre-A,D. 700

The record of disease in Japan’s prehistory is a mat­ter of guesswork. In the earliest times, the Paleo­lithic (150,000 B.C. to 10,000 B.C.) and Neolithic (10,000 B.C. to 200 B.C.) periods, population was too sparse to sustain many afflictions.

Evidence indi­cates that there was a Malthusian crisis in the late Neolithic epoch, about 1000 B.C., but archaeologists have not been able to discern any signs of infectious diseases in the skeletons of Neolithic peoples (Kitδ 1983). The bronze and iron ages (200 B.C. to A.D. 300), when rice agriculture was imported from the Asian mainland, would seen to have been an age of great population increase and therefore of potential disease outbreak as well. However, again the ar­chaeological record gives no indication of illnesses in those few skeletons that remain. Similarly, there is little evidence on disease for the era from 300 to 500.

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Source: Kiple Kenneth F. (Editor). The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge University Press,1993. — 1200 p.. 1993

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