[LINK] "The Shadow of the Emishi"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at GNXP Razib posts an analysis of a recent paper I sent him suggesting that unusual markers in the population of the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu may be legacies of the Emishi, the indigenous people of the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu conquered a millennium ago.

The Yayoi presumably brought rice from the Asian mainland, probably from what is today southern Korea. But the Japanese islands were not uninhabited before this period. Japan was home to the Jomon culture, which has a rather storied history in the annals of archaeology. The Jomon seem to have been a predominantly hunter-gatherer population which was also sedentary, and engaged in the production of objects such as pottery which are normally associated with more advanced farming societies. I have a difficult time crediting the ~13,000 year period of continuous development which is attributed to the Jomon, but, it does seem likely that the period between 2,000 and 2,500 years before the present did mark a sharp cultural discontinuity in the Japanese islands, as Jomon gave way to Yayoi.

A related issue to this indisputable cultural shift is the question of whether it was accompanied by a demographic transition. This particular debate is fraught with politics, but we have enough genetic information that we can hazard a tentative guess. It does look like the Jomon-Yayoi cultural shift was accompanied by a significant demographic transition. In particular, the Ainu of the north and the inhabitants of the Ryukyu islands in the south seem distinctive from the majority of Japanese who inhabit the core islands. The hypothesis that these peoples are more related to the Jomon, or directly descended from them. One must distinguish these two groups though; the Ainu remained culturally distinctive from the Japanese, in lifestyle and language before their de facto absorption into the Japanese of late. In contrast, the people of the Ryukyus today seem to be clearly related to the southern Japanese in both language and lifestyle. If the Ryukyu islanders preserve more of the Jomon ancestral heritage, it may simply be due to the dilution of the signal of the original Yayoi pioneers as they moved south.

[. . .]

First, the Okinawan sample, from the Ryukyu islands, is clearly more distant from all the main island samples. This is what we’d expect. But second, notice that the highest value of genetic distance is between Tokai-Hokuriku and Tohoku.

Tokai-Hokuriku and Tohoku are both on Honshu, the former in the center of the island, between Tokyo and Osaka, and the latter to the far north. Tohoku then is coterminous with the former Emishi region. Some of the patterns here are made clear by the recent history of migration within the Japanese islands. Tokyo is in Kanto-Koshinstsu, and is naturally a magnet for individuals from all over the country. Hokkaido was settled by Japanese only within the last 200 years, and not through gradual expansion from Tohoku to the south.

The traces are weak, as you'd expect given the nature of the conquest and settlement of region, but they're indicative. Or may be, at least.