Postglacial inception and growth of anthropogenic landscapes in China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East

With the onset of deglaciation in the Northern Hemisphere about 20,000 years ago, a rich temperate biota, earlier driven southward by ice-age cold, began its long, slow return to East Asia. Fully modern and technologically sophisticated Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens communities re-engineered their ecological niche in keeping with these changes by mapping on to newly productive hunting localities, gathering grounds, and raw-material sources and situating their wintering/home base residential sites in relation to the others. Acorns, nuts, annual seeds, and other foods accessed within such logistic networks were at first gathered wild, but over millennia came to be harvested, tended, and finally domesticated in great quantity. Agriculture, population, and infrastructural additions to natural landscapes expanded in scope. Over a long period, originally familistic lineage heads and elders claimed an ever-increasing authority and personal share of the collective wealth generated by the community. Archeological evidence and written histories, appearing earliest in Central China, document the rise of elite family dynasties that garnered enormous wealth and luxury through their control of agriculture, industry, and trade, while peasant laborers profited far less. Military force applied to outsiders on their borders, and at times to their own people, became an important instrument of this ruling class. Central Riverine China led in all these developments, and over time neighboring peoples in Northeast China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East engineered their own civic and productive infrastructures according to the same dynamics, resulting in a pervasive spread of anthropogenic landscapes throughout East Asia.