Near glacial maxima, archaic humans could have walked to Japan, so they surely did. Elephants made it.
Most of the time, even in the ice ages, Japan was fairly isolated. Maybe the northern path through Sakhalin was open (although glaciated) , but most of the time water separated Korea and Japan.
There must have been versions of homo erectus and Denisovans in Japan. They haven’t been found, but I think people haven’t looked much.. It used to be assumed nobody lived in Japan before the Jōmon, so people didn’t dig before the Jōmon stratum (14,000 BC).
But there must have been archaics there, back in the Paleolithic.
Seek and ye shall find.
West Hunter 
The wikipedia article you link to says “Palaeoloxodon naumanni was hunted by the inhabitants of the time. Some fossils were found around Lake Nojiri in Nagano prefecture, together with many lithic and bone tool artifacts.” So wouldn’t it already be conventional wisdom that there were humans in Japan around the same time as the elephants?
Those elephants existed until fairly recently, around 15,000 years ago, although they go back way earlier.
Wiki thinks pre-Jomon AMH is the conventional wisdom – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Paleolithic –
The starting dates commonly given to this period are from around 40,000 BC;[2] although any date of human presence before 35,000 BC is controversial, with artifacts supporting a pre-35,000 BC human presence on the archipelago being of questionable authenticity
What Greg says was true until 1946 though
The study of the Paleolithic period in Japan did not begin until quite recently: the first Paleolithic site was not discovered until 1946, right after the end of World War II[1]. Due to the previous assumption that humans did not live in Japan before the Jōmon period, excavations usually stopped at the beginning of the Jōmon stratum (14,000 BC), and were not carried on further. However, since that first Paleolithic find by Tadahiro Aizawa, around 5,000 Paleolithic sites have been discovered, some of them at existing Jōmon archaeological sites, and some dating to the Pleistocene era.
Wikipedia pages, seek and ye shall find.
Pre-AMH hominids must have existed in Japan.
Maybe. But if they’ve not been found, it’s not so clear that it’s because people just haven’t dug (under the spell of a “Jomon first” delusion).
The Japanese have built a lot of infrastructure in recent decades. Wouldn’t all the digging necessary for that have dug up bones?
Another question: during Ice Ages, would humans have tended to cluster below modern sea levels where the climate would be warmest and marine resources closest, thus leading to a lot of bones being inundated?
You’d think so, but those bones have to be there. Probably some were in now-drowned areas, but there was nothing wrong with the Tokyo Plain.
I’m predicting here. Such remains must exist, unless there was an Authorized Personnel Only sign on the Korean land bridge.
If you are buiding in Scotland and you come across anything even vaguely fossily or archeologisty you have to stop, cover and inform some Department in Edinburgh, this often happens. Is it the same in Japan, legally or culturally?
There could be a ‘finding Indian remains on your property’ situation– i.e. if you ever want to build on or do anything with your property again, you don’t breath a word about it.
So, Elephant extinction probably marks the arrival of humans, right?
Homo japonicus
You’re right. It’s all Greek to me.
I think it’s been clear for a while that the default assumption should be there were archaics pretty much everywhere they could have been. What’s more interesting is: who left some DNA in moderns? Another default assumption should be that we bred with everyone we met… but whether anything made it to modern populations is a different story. So far we know the answer is yes for (multiple) Neanderthals and (multiple) Denisovans, seemingly no for floresiensis, lots going on in Africans… exciting times to know that we should gain a lot more clarity soon.
And thick and fast they came at last …
Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans
Consider this, though: over in Europe when Neanders got cold, in between warm periods, they cannibalised each other and drove down their own populations. Neanders had brain capacity greater than ours let alone hobbits.
Japan is not like Luzon or Flores. When it gets cold in Hokkaido, it gets arctic; when it gets cold in Honshu, the coast is habitable… but only for fishermen. Thag Simmons don’t fish.
Humanoids might have made it to Japan but then, not being as bright as (even) Neanders, starved out. We will be lucky to find Homo Japonicus remains.
Homo erectus survived near Peking.
Hard to imagine Denisovans living in the Tibetan Plateau then to pass on those introgressed high altitude variants, or in the arctic to pass on those introgressed artic variants.
But it seems very much like that must have happened.
We also directly find them at Denisova cave. Japan doesn’t seem clearly tougher.
Japanese may not want to know, given their treatment of Ainu and hostility to being closely related to Koreans.
Such maps are quite hard to find in systematic fashion :c
I wonder what levels of inner seas-lakes were.
Wasn’t there a Japanese scientist who was humiliated for, ‘finding’ just such remains.
A faker, who discredited the idea and, perhaps, discredited others from looking.
Shouldn’t they be seeking for those archaic remains as genes in the Japanese genome, instead of digging the earth?
Would be good to find a few more skeletons.. I, for one, really want to see what Denisovans looked like, how big their skulls and general proportions were compared to Neanderthals. It would be interesting to find stone tools as well.
But maybe these Chinese fossils, like Dali man, were really Denisovans. How would we tell?
Unfortunately there were multiple divergent lines (note post above), so trying to get a sense of what the “Denisovans” look like might be difficult… in that you’re asking what multiple sets of hominids, diverged by 300 kya and subject to different climatic selection pressures and introgression events, looked like. To say what they look like is to say “Different from each other”!
We might be able to find their last common ancestor but I don’t know if that would tell us much about cranial capacity for’ex – how much does reconstructing the Homo Sapiens LCA tell us about modern human cranial capacity? Or late Homo Heidelbergensis tell us about late Neanderthal cranial capacity? Not so much.
Which part of the Japanese islands would be a good candidate for such fossils? Hokkaido?
Kyushu.
Think about how Europeans have less Neanderthal ancestry than East Asians. Think about how Denisova cave hominid signal is found most prominently. Why is the signal going to survive in modern Japanese (or even Ainu)? Why would we be able to find it by looking at Japanese relative to other present day people?
When I was a schoolboy they were referred to as Hairy Ainu. When was the “hairy” dropped?
Asians have a very tiny percentage more neanderthal than Europeans. What likely happened is there was interbreeding between ATM’s, anatomically modern humans, and the other human subspecies, Neanderthals and Denisovans when they were intellectual equals. Once ATM’s gained the upper hand intellectually they fairly quickly would kill their competitors without breeding with them.
Here is the state of public awareness on recent human evolution. John Hawks has a brilliant lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzbVxroaO-M. it has 882 views. Here is another lecture titled Neanderthal, profile of a super predator.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZbmywzGAVs&t=772s. It has 538,673 views, It is complete garbage. It has pictures of hulking black gorilla man beasts, supposedly Neanderthals, raping our delicate white women. Just thought I would throw that out there.
Expecting people to read Hawks on Neanderthals rather than some lurid retard’s video with lots of rape and monsters, is like expecting the Alt Right to take inspiration from Cochran rather than the retards and self publicists they actually take inspiration from (Sargon of fucking Akkad and other similar dumbshits).
The set of people who aren’t happy clappy deluded liberals and who actually have a genuine interest in how things really were is also largely too dumb to read anything but lurid, simplified, dopey versions of how things went down that they can then use to score points within communities of other folk of middling-low intelligence.
The Ainu apparently traditionally believed that they were preceded in Japan by a race of pygmies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro-pok-guru
Though attempts to find other sources about the Koro-pok-guru usually lead to cryptid enthusiast websites.