The Origins of Japanese people

Japanese and southern Chinese lack the pure C3 (M217) marker that is found in Koreans, Buryats, Tungusic peoples and northeast Han.

Japanese don't have the P31 marker found in Koreans and Tungusic people.

The D marker found in Japanese links them with Tibetans.


Edited by zstripe - 14-Nov-2008 at 07:59

Bernard Woolley, it seems to me that we are talking about two different things. The focus of my post was on the physical/biological aspect of people and their relation to each other. In short I was talking about race.  I know that many people have issues with this but that is a different matter all together as nobody can change my interest and focus on the physical aspects of human/hominid evolution and interactions.
On the other hand your focus, at least on the surface, seems to be on culture.
I can see that there is a general problem in the subject that might cause confusion between the racial aspect and the cultural aspect of the jomon-Yayoi or aboriginal-foreign relations in the Japanese isles. Namely the fact that the native peoples responsible for the making of Jomon culture and the immigrants whose possession and importation of agriculture was responsible for the Yayoi culture, lack their own names and are often simply identified with the names of the cultures they created, apart from the ambiguous name 'Yamato' for the latter group. This probably caused the confusion between the focus of my post and your post. As we know, although intimately related, culture and people are two different things and can travel differently.
My post was also about the aboriginal-foreign relation of people in Japan as a whole both in time and space of which the Emishi are only a part of, as opposed to your stronger focus on the Emishi and their culture.
In conclusion, I see nothing in your post that contradicts anything in my post.

The obvious difference between the Jomon culture and the Yayoi culture is that the former is characterised by hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the latter by agricultural or farming lifestyle which was introduced by the immigrants who started migrating into the Japanese isles from around 400BC onwards.
Satsumon culture which is together with the Okhotsk culture considered to be ancestral to the Ainu culture was created sometime around 600AD~800AD by the Emishi people who fled from the severe wars of conquest by the Japanese against the Emishi in eastern and northern Honshu. The article I posted: http://www.emishi-ezo.net/WhoEmishi.htm in which you found the article: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hokkaido/ainu.html, very clearly mentions the following: ''According to archeological findings from the fifth to the seventh centuries AD, the northern half of Tohoku (roughly extending from northern Miyagi prefecture to Aomori) and the western part of Hokkaido formed a single cultural area, and many Ainu place names are left in the Tohoku. It is beyond the discussion of this introduction to go into the Jomon, Epi-Jomon and Yayoi cultures as they affected the Tohoku region, but to simplify this discussion, it is now believed that evidence points to the Emishi tie in with the Tohoku Middle Yayoi pottery culture that is heavily influenced by Jomon forms--almost as if these peoples were gradually adopting Yayoi culture from the seventh to the eighth centuries.''

I have no objection to and do not remember writing anything against Emishi people being of mixed stock of aboriginals and immigrants, especially since
1. They had already possessed agriculture which was one of the cornerstones of the immigrants and the Yayoi culture.
2. They were in Honshu the same island the immigrants landed, and shared borders with the Yamato/Japanese people.
3. Their presence and resistance is mainly noted long after 400BC which was when the immigrants started to come in.

So it is natural to assume that they were already heavily mixed with the immigrants, however this is where we have to think about the merits of agriculture over hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Agriculture or farming lifestyle can sustain far larger population than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This in my opinion is the main reason the immigrants flourished in their numbers wherever they settled and were able to outnumber and absorb the aboriginal peoples without receiving from them any dramatic genetic influence enough to alter their physical appearance.
However, from
1. the chronology of changes in the pottery styles in the Tohoku region which changed from epi-Jomon to Yayoi styles around 600AD
2. the low population around the same time of the Emishi people compared to the Yamato people
3. their geographical location (Michinoku) which was the furthest in Honshu from where the immigrants came in.
4. their recorded appearance, such as their hairiness
5. their language
we can see that the influence of the immigrants was still recent and minimal, and that they still retained a much larger aboriginal element in them, both physically and linguistically, compared to the Yamato/Japanese people.

So I would say yes, your analogy of comparing the Yamato-Emishi relation to that of the English-French colonies in north America with the focus on culture does work, but my analogy of comparing the whole aboriginal-foreign relation of Japan to that of the native-European relation in north America with the focus on physical anthropology and racial influence does also work.

I don't agree with your statement that little thought has been given in this thread regarding the contribution of the Emishi to the Japanese. The discussion of the Emishi and indigenous people started in this thread with the focus on their military contribution and their influence on (or possibly their creation of) the Samurai class within the Yamato/Japanese society. So it all started from the thought about their contribution. I would be very happy though to hear about more than just military contribution.




Edited by omshanti - 13-Nov-2008 at 20:30

Originally posted by omshanti   Their facial structure simply made me think that they might have been originally related to Australian aboriginals or Papua New Guineans,

Edited by Cryptic - 12-Nov-2008 at 17:31

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Most Japanese are descended from the Jomon, among other things. The same goes for the Emishi.

Weren't the first samurais the frontier guardsmen on the borders with Ainu and Amishu? I read that the Japanese horse archery was actually learned by samurais from Amishu. In this light the argument about bushido adobted from Ainu could indeed make some sense.

Edited by Sarmat12 - 06-Nov-2008 at 16:59

Originally posted by SameButDifferent It is from the Ainu that the Japanese derive thier samirai mythology.

http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content-nw/full/172/4/2431/TBL1

Basically shows that nearly all Japanese O3 belongs to O3a5.

In Koreans, most O3 belong to O3*, suggesting ancient origins about 50,000 years ago. In North Koreans, the frequency of O3a5 (O3e) is much lower than other East Asian populations and even some Tungusic peoples.

And Japanese don't have the pure haplogroup C3 (no subclade) that 15%+ Koreans and Siberians (Nivkhs, Koryaks and Buryats) have.

Plus Japanese are more related to Tibetans (high rates of haplogroup D and O3e/O3a5). Japanese are only 20-30% haplogroup O2b, whereas in Koreans it's around 20-48%.

Haplogroup O3a5a (O3e1) is found in Japanese, Tibetans and southern Han Chinese at moderately high frequencies. In fact nearly all of the Japanese haplogroup O3 belong to O3a5.


Edited by zstripe - 05-Nov-2008 at 07:04