Lake Nojiri Underwater Excavation Site was added to Your Favorites!
Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan NP, Nagano
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The excavation story began with a tooth mistaken for a hot-water bottle. In 1948, local innkeeper Matsunosuke Kato found a Naumann elephant molar on the lakebed and kept it after the school principal suggested it might be an elephant’s tooth.
A 40cm elephant footprint took 3 years of preparation and an all-night dig to confirm in 1990. Stone tools suggest people were here, but no human bones or footprints had been found by the 2025 excavation.
In 1973, a Naumann elephant tusk and a Yabe’s giant deer antler were found nestled together, earning the nickname “Moon and Stars.” Researchers wondered if Ice Age people had arranged them—but that idea remains unproven.
During the snowy March 2025 excavation, local residents served the field crew vegetable soup and soup made with rainbow trout raised in Kurohime’s natural waters—a very local warm-up between fossil finds.
A 2.4m tusk, an elephant skull, bone tools and a spear-shaped wooden object were among the finds from the 1981 dig. Together, clues like these helped support the idea that Tategahana was a hunting and butchering site.
Tategahana is usually underwater. In winter, water released for hydropower lowers Lake Nojiri by about 2m, uncovering the lakebed so researchers can dig—a seasonal opening onto the Ice Age.
Yabe’s giant deer had hand-shaped antlers spanning about 1.8m from one side to the other. Fossils of this enormous-antlered deer are among the discoveries at Lake Nojiri.
The 2025 dig uncovered a jasper core, a piece of stone left after flakes were struck off to make tools. Jasper does not occur naturally at Lake Nojiri, so people may have carried it from elsewhere.
The 2025 excavation recovered 138 plant fossils, including spruce and hemlock cones, a plum pit and a Korean pine seed. Tiny remains like these help researchers picture what grew around the ancient lake.
The 1975 dig drew 3,672 participants and yielded more than 10,000 finds. Children and adults work alongside specialists, and the museum’s labels name the people who discovered its fossils and tools.
