Thanks for this amazing post — I had heard of Kennewick Man long ago (high school in the ‘90s, probably), but never knew of the connection to the Ainu.
My wife is Ainu, and while she has beautiful multicolored hair and lighter skin that most Japanese, she’s not the least bit interested in the language or traditional culture. (Her grandmother, the last to experience real Ainu life in a ‘kotan’ or village, died long ago.) So it’s up to me to study all this stuff. What a pleasant surprise it is to find more people who are interested in the Ainu.
Thanks and ‘iyayraykere’ again!
I believe the current Emperor has the extra roots in fact.
There may well have been contact between the Yakut and the Ainu in pre-end of Ice Age populations too. Folks are just now getting around to digging up the bones in China proper, although quite a bit has been done in Russian Siberia and Inner Mongolia right on back to the 1920s.
Now, the light hair syndrome ~ no doubt you've noticed there are folks with redhair in Japan. However, many of them owe that simply to the diameter of their hair which refracts light breaking out the red frequencies. Others have a gene for red and blond tones that is in a different place and has substantially different coding than those found in Caucasion populations. Then there are leftovers from the Mongol Empire. They brought in tens of thousands of trained and capable bureaucrats and military specialists from their Western holdings, e.g. Mesopotamia, Persia, Bulgaria, Ungarn, etc. They left some "blond roots" Fur Shur. Some of their legacy found themselves relocated to Japan in the normal course of commerce and trade.
With modern hair treatments it is possible to blend into the background so it's getting harder to find East Asian natives with natural blond or red hair. At the same time the world of Anime has made it popular to dye air, so there are innumerable blonds and redheads wandering about anyway!
You do know this stuff is all pretty new ~ up until the human genome project the differences in populations in East Asia were simply thought to be cultural in nature. No one cold look for the major biological differences from place to place. Now they can. Tooth root counts are pretty fundamental if you think about it ~ certainly more telling than something minor like skin tone.
Comparable work in the West demonstrated that the Sa'ami were NOT descended from East Asians ~ rather, they arose out of a background in the refugia that accounts for the greater part of modern European populations. However, they have some truly major biological differences that undoubtedly arose from the experience of living on the margins of the great glaciers in the far North for several thousands years longer than everybody else. Their counterparts in East Asia are, of course, the three extant tribes of Eskimos. They even share many of the same gene based diseases (and virtually nothing else).