Bronze Defines Time Better

(9) Bronze is different. It is as ornamental as copper, and it takes a much keener edge. It was sought after more eagerly by the neighbours of those primitive civilisations that discovered it. Many an experiment must have been made before an alloy could be found to remedy the defects of copper. But, when found, it spread rapidly amongst civilised peoples, so that we find the bronze ages over the Old World much nearer being contemporaneous in their beginnings. That of the north-east and east of Asia seems to have started in the fourth millennium before our era. And, according to a vague tradition, there came into the South Island of Japan about 1240 b.c. a cultured race with finely formed weapons of bronze, as well as of stone, and drove the Ainos north. The legendary founder of the Japanese empire, Jimmu Tenno, is placed only in the seventh century before our era. But the gradual migration from Korea and the struggle with the aborigines must have gone on for many centuries before the evolution of such a political unity. Their bronze and beautiful stone weapons must have given them a great superiority over those whom they call in their annals Ebisu or barbarians, a name that stands for the "hairy Ainu," and over those primitive peoples who built the huge burial mounds, and the People of the Hollows, who lived in dwellings half underground. It is not improbable that this may date the beginning of one of the sea-migrations of the megalithic people down into the islands of the Pacific. If so, they did not profit by the weapons of their enemies, for no bronze has ever been found in these islands, except a Tamil ship-bell in New page 44Zealand. Of course, the pressure of the Mongols from behind must have begun long before this; must have begun, in fact, when they started north-east towards Behring Straits and found their way into America during some temporary elevation of the temperature in the North Pacific. Evidence for this is found in the fact that the Ainos once occupied the coast of Korea and Manchuria, and were driven into the archipelago. And when they crossed they must have displaced the earlier aborigines of Japan that their traditions speak of. But the greatest impulse to migration over the sea, both north and south, must have come when the Mongols arrived and took to founding an empire. The millennium just before our era doubtless saw vast transferences of the megalithic people in ocean-going canoes into the island-world to the south, and of smaller migrations north along the Kurile and Aleutian groups into British Columbia in coast-hugging canoes.

(10) Of one thing we may be sure, that migration into Polynesia ceased from Japan at the foundation of the empire in the south of it during the seventh century before our era. Else bronze weapons and tools and ornaments would have gone with the emigrants into the new lands.