Japanese origins

Yesterday the big news was Japan. As the abstract says, the canon history of Japan is a split from the mainland after the Late Glacial Maximum, with the Jomon. The modern population is a synthesis between the Jomon and later northeast Asian farmers, the "Yayoi". Now, we have the details.

Japan was inhabited from 36kBC on, but not always as an island, or at least not always invisible to the mainland. The Jomon make sense as an insular race from, indeed, the Ice Age. They kept a population of all of a thousand(!) over the Palaeolithic there. The Yayoi, again indeed, brought rice, presumably to the southern islands: Ryushu, southern Honshu. They are dated to 1000 BC which is, in China, Bronze Age and Zhou Dynasty. (China never really joined the Iron Age.)

Before Jomon isolation, the ancestral population mixed with Ancient North Siberians, which I am pretty sure means "pre-Ainu". Although, I should be clear, the Ainu and the Jomon are not identical. The Jomon base was Honshu against other islands such as Hokkaido.

So I don't learn what's up with Hokkaido over this period. Possible it was abandoned over the Ice Age, if it was ever bothered with; and secondarily populated by Ainu from the Amur during the last two millennia.

A little surprised to see Jomon "pottery" noted 14500 BC, which the authors assure me is ceramic. This is impressive given that pottery in the Near Eastern Mesolithic, many millennia later, is still carved from stone.

The Kofun era begins about AD 300, which is post-Han, barely.

Jomon women were N9b or M7a; their men were D1b1. These still exist in Japan, so the Yayoi-Jomon interbreeding theory stands tall. Ancient "Yayoi" populations actually cluster with Jomon, although less as time goes on, hinting that Yayoi came from the northeast Asian mainland and only trickled into Japan slowly; also, that the Jomon adapted Yayoi farming. The Jomon were never stupid as we can see from their pottery. As for the Yayoi point of ingress, perhaps-unsurprisingly that came from the Korean Peninsula.

Northeast Asia seems an unlikely region to learn to farm rice, which conundrum is made worse by the Yayoi ancestry: West Liao and Baikal, say the authors. I also cannot find when rice was introduced to Korea; it seems a Bronze Age import at earliest, Shang or even Zhou era. One might ask if the Yayoi only farmed rice after they got to Japan. If the Jomon learnt first, their increased prosperity then attracted mainland immigrants.

It seems, though, that the Kofun were more solidly mainland East Asian. More: AD 300 is quite late enough that we may speak of "Chinese", in fact literal Han; which I would not always say of what's now "South China" and which nobody says of the South Koreans.

The Kofun washed over the ancestral Honshu Yayoi-Jomon mix, if not quite overwhelmed it, such that modern Honshu Japanese are less Jomon than they otherwise would be. Since the Kofun and the Yayoi were, at first, consciously different nations and different races, they spoke languages from different language-families.

As to what this means for the Japonic family of languages, since the Kofun came to dominate that's the language I think they spoke. As noted above I don't consider the Ainu to be related to any of the populations noted here, except remotely distantly before even the Jomon came to be. I don't think any Yayoi language survived to get a record although some placenames and other loanwords assuredly entered the Japanese language(s). The authors think the Yayoi are closest to Tunguisic (sic) speakers, so paraManchu I guess.

If there exists a Han-era ethnography of the east, such might tell us.

CERAMIC 12/27/22: 18kBC Siberia. Also we're hearing the Beringians had arrowheads already.