BioQuick News
Posted on 07/02/2019 1:29:35 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The current theory on human migrations into Japan is that the original inhabitants, the Jomon people, were met about 2,500 years ago by a separate group coming mainly from the Korean Peninsula, the Yayoi people.
Archaeologists have identified fewer Jomon sites from the Late Jomon Period, the era immediately before the Yayoi arrival. Global temperatures and sea levels dropped during that period, which could have made life more difficult for the hunter-gatherer Jomon people.
When the Yayoi people arrived, they brought wet rice farming to Japan, which would have led to a more stable food supply for the remaining Jomon people living with the new Yayoi migrants.
The lesser amount of archaeological remains from the Late Jomon Period could be evidence of an actual population decline, or just that the archaeological dig sites have not yet been found...
The research team identified one group of DNA sequences that only Japanese men had. That unique sequence group likely came from the Jomon people. The researchers identified six sequence groups common to both Japanese men and men with other East Asian heritage (Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese), which likely came from the Yayoi people or other ancestors common to Japanese and East Asian people...
Interestingly, modern Japanese men seem to have a greater percentage of Jomon ancestral DNA in their Y chromosomes than the rest of their genomes...
Since it is easier for a sequence to become common in a small population, this is another indication that the size of the Jomon population decreased during the Late Jomon Period before the arrival of the Yayoi people.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
Glad they solved that whole global warming thing.
which could have made life more difficult for the hunter-gatherer Jomon people.
Never mind.
Wouldn't it also be consistent with large numbers of Jomon men being killed off by invading Yayoi?
"The Ainu people are historically residents of parts of Hokkaido (the Northern island of Japan) the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin. According to the government, there are currently 25,000 Ainu living in Japan, but other sources claim there are up to 200,000. The origin of the Ainu people and language is, for the most part, unknown. However, there have been many theories on the subject.One theory suggests that the Ainu people are remnants of the Jomon-jin, or the hunter-gathers who inhabited Japan during the Jomon Period (14,500 BC – 300 AD) and perhaps even before. Around the year 300 AD, another group of immigrants known as the Yayoi people made their way to the islands of Japan, introducing new agricultural techniques and technology and integrating with the Jomon people. It is believed that the Yayoi group may not have reached as far as the Northern island of Hokkaido, allowing the Jomon hunter-gatherer way of life to survive in that area."
"Physically, the Ainu stand out distinctly from the Japanese as a separate ethnic group. Ainu people tend to have light skin, a stout frame, deep-set eyes with a European shape, and thick, wavy hair. Full-blooded Ainu may have even had blue eyes or brown hair. In the past, the Ainu were proposed to be of Caucasian decent, given their appearance, but recently it has been proved through dental morphology and fingerprinting that the Ainu are in fact Mongoloid, not Caucasoid."
A couple nights ago I spent several hours reading about the first humans in Japan.
Apparently, the oldest bones they have are in the 14,000 to 15,000 year old range, and, until recently, very little research had been done on sites that might be older than that.
A pre-15,000 year old arrival date for humans would put them right at the center of the coldest part of the last ice age.
Humans could have probably walked, or floated, or island hopped into the Japanese mainland from Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin, or Kamchatka.
It shouldn’t be too tough to figure out if there is any connection between the jomo and the ainu by genetic analysis.
In (mostly North) America there's Clovis-first-and-only; Japan's glass floor beneath which human presence can't fall is even more strict.
We think alike.
"The Ainu and their origin have always been rather mysterious, with some people claiming that the Ainu are really Caucasian or proto-Caucasian - in other words, "white." At present, Brace's study denies this interpretation."
"Jomon pottery from Japan has been dated to around 16,000 years ago (14,000 B.C.) and is regarded as the oldest in the world although of similar ages have been found in southern China, the Russian Far East, and Korea."
I've read that blue-eyes in all humans is related to only one mutation event.
If sea levels dropped wouldn't that have given them more coastline to hunt and gather on and mean that more of their sites are now offshore and undiscovered?
One of the programs on NatG a few years ago had an episode about the finding of Jomon-type pottery in digs in an area of S America dating back 1000’s of years-the archaeologists were speculating whether the pottery was a part of trade-goods brought from what is now Japan or locally made by settlers from the Jomon area of Japan-either way, it establishes a much earlier date for sea travel from what is now Japan to what is now S America-humans have always been a lot more innovative and clever than they are given credit for-trade was what made people travel and explore from the beginning-and it just makes sense that they used boats-low sea levels so they could shore-hug made sailing the path of least resistance...
Maybe they were talking about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdivia_culture#Influences_on_Valdivia_culture
additional sidebar from blam’s link:
http://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat16/sub105/item484.html
Yes-that is what they were talking about-thanks!
If the Jomon DNA of Japanese men is found more in the Y chromosome, wouldn’t that indicate that Jomon men were reproducing quite successfully, and their male children were being preserved? Maybe Jomon men were living in more isolated places and kidnapping Yayoi females? Or perhaps they were successful in fighting and capturing Yayoi females? Maybe the Yayoi females found this Jomon men particularly attractive?
That's where it persisted, but the percentage of modern Japanese who have looks pretty good, considering how long it's been.
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