272 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



or less length, and narrower than the chamber itself, or more 

 rarely, they are of the form known as allee couverte, in which 

 the space enclosed by the side stones resembles a long gallery 

 of considerable dimensions." 



Besides these dolmens Japan contains many other memorials 

 of a remote past shell mounds, cave-dwellings, and in Yezo 

 certain pits, which are not occupied by the present Ainu popula- 

 tion, but are by them attributed to the Koro-pok-guru^ " People 

 of the Hollows," who occupied the land before their arrival, and 

 lived in huts built over these pits. Similar remains on an islet 

 near Nemuro on the north-east coast of Yezo are said by the 

 Japanese to have belonged to the Kobito, a dwarfish race ex- 

 terminated by the Ainu, hence apparently identical with the 

 Koro-pok-guru. They are associated by Mr John Milne with 

 some primitive peoples of the Kurile Islands, Sakhalin, and 

 Kamchatka, who, like the Eskimo of the American coast, had 

 extended formerly much farther south than at present. 



In a kitchen-midden, 330 by 200 feet, near Shiidzuka in 

 the province of Ibaraki, the Japanese antiquaries S. Yagi and 

 M. Shinomura 1 have found numerous objects belonging to the 

 Stone Age of Japan. Amongst them were flint implements, 

 worked bones, ashes, pottery, and a whole series of clay figures 

 of human beings. The finders suggest that these remains may 

 have belonged to a homogeneous race of the Stone Period, who, 

 however, were not the ancestors of the Ainu hitherto generally 

 regarded as the first inhabitants of Japan. In the national 

 records va'gue reference is made to other aborigines, such as the 

 " Long-Legs," and the "Eight Wild Tribes," described as the 

 enemies of the first Japanese settlers in Kiu-shiu, and reduced 

 by Jimmu Tenno, the semi-mythical founder of the present 

 dynasty ; the Ebisu, who are probably to be identified with the 

 Ainu; and the Seki-Manzi^ "Stone Men," also located in the 

 southern island of Kiu-shiu. The last-mentioned, of whom, 

 however, little further is known, seem to have the best claim 

 to be associated with the above described remains of early man 

 in Japan. 



1 Zur Priihistorik Japans, Glolnts, 1896, No. 10. 



