The adoption of agriculture after the Ice Age prompted the dispersion of some of the language families.
The vast family of Trans-Eurasian languages, which includes the Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and Tungusic languages, has its origins in 9,000 years, in the first agricultural communities of what is now Northeast China, according to a study combining linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence.
The detailed findings document a genetic ancestry shared by the hundreds of millions of people who speak what the researchers call trans-European languages in an area that stretches for more than 8,000 km.
Adoption of agriculture and the dispersion of language
The findings illustrate how humanity’s adoption of agriculture after the Ice Age drove the dispersal of some of the world’s major language families. Millet was an important crop in the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture.
There are 98 trans-European languages. These include Korean and Japanese, as well as several Turkic languages, such as Turkish, in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia, and Siberia; various Mongolian languages, such as Mongolian, in Central Asia and the Northeast; and several Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia.
Neolithic millet farmers
The beginnings of this language family date back to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River Valley, an area that encompasses parts of China’s Liaoning and Jilin provinces and the Inner Mongolia region. As these farmers moved through Northeast Asia, the descendant languages spread over thousands of years north and west, to Siberia and the steppes, and east, to the Korean peninsula and the sea, to the Japanese archipelago.
An uncomfortable truth for many
The research revealed the complex beginnings of modern populations and cultures.
“Accepting that the roots of one’s language, culture or people lie beyond current national borders is a kind of renunciation of identity, which some people are not yet willing to do,” says comparative linguist Martine Robbeets, leader of the Archaeolinguistics Research Group of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of the History of Humanity in Germany and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
“Powerful nations, such as Japan, Korea and China, are often imagined as representatives of a language, a culture and a genetic profile. But one truth that makes people with nationalistic agendas uncomfortable is that all languages, cultures and humans, including those of Asia, are mixed, ”Robbeets added.
Data from 255 archaeological sites
The researchers developed a vocabulary concept data set for all 98 languages, identified a core of inherited words related to agriculture, and formed a family tree of the languages.
Archaeologist and study co-author Mark Hudson of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History said the researchers examined data from 255 archaeological sites in China, Japan, the Korean Peninsula and the Russian Far East, and evaluated the similarities of artifacts, such as pottery, stone tools, and plant and animal remains. They also took into account the dates of 269 ancient crop remains from various sites.
The researchers determined that farmers in Northeast China ended up supplementing millet with rice and wheat, an agricultural package that was passed down when these populations spread to the Korean Peninsula around 1300 BC and from there to Japan after 1000. BC approximately.
Genomic analysis
The researchers conducted genomic analyzes of the ancient remains of 23 people and examined existing data on others who lived in North and East Asia up to 9,500 years ago.
For example, the remains of a woman found in Yokchido, South Korea, were 95% of ancestry from the ancient Jomon people of Japan, indicating that their recent ancestors had migrated by sea.
“It is surprising to see that ancient Koreans reflect Jomon ancestry, which until now has only been detected in Japan,” Robbeets said.
The origins of modern Chinese languages arose independently, albeit in a similar way, with millet also implicated. While the progenitors of the Trans-Eurasian languages cultivated millet in the Liao River Valley, the creators of the Sino-Tibetan language family were cultivating foxtail millet around the same time in China’s Yellow River region, paving the way for an independent linguistic dispersion, Robbeets explained. (I)
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