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The story
Associate Professor Takashi Gakuhari of Kanazawa University analyzed the genome of a male skeleton unearthed from a Kofun-period archaeological site in Iida, Nagano Prefecture, and found that alongside Jomon ancestry, the remains showed strong genetic traits linked to China’s Yellow River basin — with no clear Yayoi ancestry detected. This runs counter to the long-standing theory that “the ancestors of the Japanese are the Jomon and Yayoi peoples,” suggesting the formation of modern Japanese people may have been more complicated than previously thought. On 5ch, opinions were divided over what this “Chinese” component actually represents, how the Kofun-period migrants might have arrived, and even how to define the Yayoi people in the first place.
Associate Professor Takashi Gakuhari, 42, of Kanazawa University (Kanazawa City) — a specialist in archaeological molecular biology — analyzed the genome (full genetic information) of a male skeleton excavated from a Kofun-period site in Iida City. The results showed strong Jomon and Yellow River-area Chinese genetic components, with no clear Yayoi component. The accepted theory holds that “the ancestors of the Japanese are the Jomon and Yayoi peoples,” but this case doesn’t fit that mold. “Modern Japanese people may have formed through a more complicated process than the conventional theory suggests,” he said. (737 of 917 characters remaining / full article)
Source: shinmai.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Aren't the Kofun people basically today's Koreans?
Where these Kofun people came from, how they got here, and why — all of that was totally unknown.
China might just have been a waypoint too.
Maybe they're one of those "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel" types.
They weren't Han Chinese, surely.
It means Korea has nothing to do with it.
What's so complicated about that?
You can tell just by looking in a mirror — there's a tendency in research like this to insist, no matter what, that the Japanese are somehow special.
The Yayoi lineage is Korean.
After Yayoi culture, the Kofun people showed up next and became the ruling class.
They had military and civil-engineering know-how, and since they controlled or at least influenced southern Korea too, standardized kofun tombs survive there as well.
So there's nothing strange about calling them migrant Yayoi people.
The Yellow River basin doesn't really do paddy rice, though.
Somehow I get the feeling the Kofun people had more "plain" faces.
(°∀°)Yayoi people were teetotalers (下戸, "non-drinkers") with good physiques. Kofun people could really hold their liquor (上戸) but were stocky.
(°∀°)hands over black oolong tea
(/◎＼) *glug*
They absolutely invaded Japan, enslaved the Japanese, and ruled over them by force.
If that were true, Japanese grammar — not just vocabulary — would show a lot more Chinese influence.
There are all kinds of patterns — migrant groups intermixing all at once, versus blending gradually over generations —
and this Iida community just happened to end up with this particular ratio.
You shouldn't generalize from one isolated case like this.
There's no such thing as a single "Yayoi race" —
"Yayoi people" is probably just the label for the blend that resulted from various groups trickling in by boat from different parts of Asia over time.
The woman buried at the Daeseong-dong tomb cluster in Gimhae (4th–5th century) and the man buried at the Mizoguchi-no-Tsuka Kofun in Iida, Nagano (mid-to-late 5th century) may be relatives separated by roughly 6–7 degrees.
What's more, unlike the West Liao River lineage — a mix of Yellow River and Northeast Siberian components — this person carried a third, distinct component: pure Central Plain ancestry.
Paleolithic people — survival rate probably wasn't great, since no trace shows up in modern DNA
Jomon people — the roots of the Japanese; anyone who still risks their life foraging for wild mountain greens and mushrooms probably has thick Jomon blood
Yayoi people — thrived thanks to knowledge of paddy farming and civil engineering, also traded with the Jomon
Kofun people — a mystery, nobody knows where they came from; maybe even the imperial family is one of them
That's exactly the problem — nobody even knows what "Yayoi people" actually means. It was Jiangnan people from the Yangtze who brought over paddy rice farming,
but then people turn around and call that group "Korean" and that's what gets labeled "Yayoi," right?
The whole definition is a complete mess.
I think it was two Miao (Hmong) people who brought over paddy rice farming.
These days they've been pushed into the mountains by other peoples, but back then they lived along the middle Yangtze and sailed downriver to land in Kyushu.
Same route as the monk Ganjin (Jianzhen).
Pretty similar story.
Rice farming was already happening back in the Jomon period, you know.
It's just that large-scale cultivation started with the Yayoi.
The Jomon lineage got called "tsuchigumo" (earth spiders) and "oni" (demons) and was shunned.
The Jomon were driven out.
They just barely survived, scraping by up in Tohoku and Ezo (Hokkaido).
Finally, haplogroup O2 Chinese came over from the mainland and everything mixed together.
The exact timing is unclear, but roughly speaking, that's the right picture, isn't it?
Yep, that's right.
O1b2 is Jiangnan people.
those are the real surviving true Japanese.
There are so few of them because they don't handle famine well.
Though they're strong in war.
If the Y-chromosome — which traces the paternal line — shows a high Jomon ratio,
that likely means the Jomon lineage was dominant within that community.
They were probably just good at surviving.
Doesn't seem like they had much ruling power.
In modern times they'd probably be unemployed.
There's a clear difference showing up.
What we can say for sure is that during the population boom of the agricultural revolution, when Jomon and Yayoi migrants interbred,
Jomon men were clearly the ones fathering children with Yayoi migrant women far more often.
(°∀°)Maybe they were craftsmen or artists — think flame-rimmed pottery.
(°∀°)hands over black oolong tea
(/◎＼) *glug*
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
For years, the leading theory on the origins of the Japanese people has been the “dual-structure model,” holding that modern Japanese arose from a mix of Jomon and Yayoi peoples. However, recent genome research has pointed to the existence of “Kofun people” who arrived during the Kofun period, and the theory that modern Japanese formed from a blend of three distinct populations is gaining traction. This report centers on the analysis of a single skeleton excavated from a site in Iida City, which showed genetic traits close to populations from the Yellow River basin. The researcher himself treats this as just one example from a single site, and the article doesn’t address the point that a single result can’t be generalized to represent an entire population’s makeup. In the thread, many commenters pointed out that the categories “Yayoi” and “Kofun” are themselves vague as to what they denote, with opinions split over the unclear migration routes and timing, and how to frame the relationship with China and the Korean peninsula.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Nagano] Kofun-Period Skeleton Is a Jomon-Chinese Mix — Excavated in Iida City, Genome Analysis Contradicts the “Established Theory” of Japanese Origins.”
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