|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 10, 2021 22:42:25 GMT
 (Reuters) - A study combining linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence has traced the origins of the family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian and the people who speak them to millet farmers who inhabited a region in northeastern China about 9,000 years ago. The findings detailed on Wednesday document a shared genetic ancestry for the hundreds of millions of people who speak what the researchers call Transeurasian languages across an area stretching more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km). The findings illustrate how humankind's embrace of agriculture following the Ice Age powered the dispersal of some of the world's major language families. Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle. There are 98 Transeurasian languages. Among these are Korean and Japanese as well as: various Turkic languages including Turkish in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia; various Mongolic languages including Mongolian in Central and Northeast Asia; and various Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia. This language family's beginnings were traced to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area encompassing parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across northeastern Asia, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and the steppes and east into the Korean peninsula and over the sea to the Japanese archipelago over thousands of years. The research underscored the complex beginnings for modern populations and cultures. "Accepting that the roots of one's language, culture or people lie beyond the present national boundaries is a kind of surrender of identity, which some people are not yet prepared to make," said comparative linguist Martine Robbeets, leader of the Archaeolinguistic Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature. |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2021 0:18:57 GMT
 A vast Transeurasian language family that contains the Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and Tungusic languages has had its origins traced back 9000 years, to early farming communities in what is now north-east China. Transeurasian languages are spoken across a wide region of Europe and northern Asia. Until now, researchers assumed that they had spread from the mountains of Mongolia 3000 years ago, spoken by horse-riding nomads who kept livestock but didn’t farm crops. Martine Robbeets at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and her colleagues used linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence to conclude instead that it was the onset of millet cultivation by farmers in what is now China that led to the spread of the language family. The team did this by studying the linguistic features of the languages and using computational analysis to map their spread through space and time based on their similarities to each other. Doing so allowed Robbeets and her team to trace the proto-Transeurasian language back to the Liao river area of north-east China around 9000 years ago. This is the exact time and place that millet is known to have been domesticated, according to archaeological evidence, says Robbeets. Read more: Over 400 languages spoken today may have originated in northern China By adding genetic information and carbon-dating millet grains, the team revealed that the proto-Transeurasian-speaking population split into separate communities that then started adopting early forms of Japanese, Korean and the Tungusic languages to the east of the original site, as well as early forms of Mongolic languages to the north and of Turkic languages to the west. “We have languages, archaeology and genetics which all have dates. So we just looked to see if they correlated,” says Robbeets. Around 6500 years ago, the descendants of some of these farmers moved eastwards into Korea, where they learned to cultivate rice around 3300 years ago, spurring the movement of people from Korea to Japan. “We all identify ourselves with language. It’s our identity. We often picture ourselves as one culture, one language, one genetic profile. Our study shows that like all populations, those in Asia are mixed,” says Robbeets. The researchers were also surprised to discover the first evidence that Neolithic Korean populations reproduced with Jōmon people, who were previously thought to have lived solely in Japan. “This study highlights the richness of the narrative that can be developed when linguistic, archaeological and genetic data are all considered,” says Melinda Yang at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04108-8 |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2021 4:18:31 GMT
Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages Martine Robbeets, Remco Bouckaert, […]Chao Ning Nature (2021) Abstract The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history1,2,3. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements4,5. Here we address this question by ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic–Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’6,7,8, we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture. Main Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA sequencing have made us rethink the connections between human, linguistic and cultural expansions across Eurasia. Compared to western Eurasia9,10,11, however, eastern Eurasia remains poorly understood. Northeast Asia—the vast region encompassing Inner Mongolia, the Yellow, Liao and Amur River basins, the Russian Far East, the Korean peninsula and the Japanese Islands—remains especially under-represented in the recent literature. With a few exceptions that are heavily focused on genetics12,13,14 or limited to reviewing existing datasets4, truly interdisciplinary approaches to Northeast Asia are scarce. The linguistic relatedness of the Transeurasian languages—also known as ‘Altaic’—is among the most disputed issues in linguistic prehistory. Transeurasian denotes a large group of geographically adjacent languages stretching across Europe and northern Asia, and includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic (Fig. 1a). The question of whether these five groups descend from a single common ancestor has been the topic of a long-standing debate between supporters of inheritance and borrowing. Recent assessments show that even if many common properties between these languages are indeed due to borrowing15,16,17, there is nonetheless a core of reliable evidence for the classification of Transeurasian as a valid genealogical group1,2,18,19. Fig. 1: Distribution of Transeurasian languages in the past and in the present.  a, Geographical distribution of the 98 Transeurasian language varieties included in this study. Contemporary languages are represented by coloured surfaces, historical varieties by red dots. For legend, see Extended Data Fig. 1. b, Reconstructed locations of Transeurasian ancestral languages spoken during the Neolithic (red) and the Bronze Age and later (green). For detailed homeland detection, see Supplementary Data 4. The estimated time-depth is based on Bayesian inference presented in Supplementary Data 24. Accepting this classification, however, gives rise to new questions about the time depth, location, cultural identity and dispersal routes of ancestral Transeurasian speech communities. Here we challenge the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’ that identifies the primary dispersals of the Transeurasian languages with nomadic expansions starting in the eastern steppe in the fourth millennium before present (BP)6,7,8, by proposing a ‘farming hypothesis’, which places those dispersals within the scope of the ‘farming/language dispersal hypothesis’5,20,21. As these issues reach far beyond linguistics, we address them by integrating archaeology and genetics in a single approach termed ‘triangulation’. |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2021 20:09:55 GMT
Linguistics
We collected a new dataset of 3,193 cognate sets that represent 254 basic vocabulary concepts for 98 Transeurasian languages, including dialects and historical varieties (Supplementary Data 1). We applied Bayesian methods to infer a dated phylogeny of the Transeurasian languages (Supplementary Data 24). Our results indicate a time-depth of 9181 BP (5595–12793 95% highest probability density (95% HPD)) for the Proto-Transeurasian root of the family; 6811 BP (4404–10166 95% HPD) for Proto-Altaic, the unity of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages; 4491 BP (2599–6373 95% HPD) for Mongolo-Tungusic; and 5458 BP (3335–8024 95% HPD) for Japano-Koreanic (Fig. 1b). These dates estimate the time-depth of the initial break-up of a given language family into more than one foundational subgroup.
We used our lexical dataset to model the expansion of Transeurasian languages in space (Supplementary Data 3, 4). We applied Bayesian phylogeography to complement classical approaches, such as lexicostatistics, the diversity hotspot principle and cultural reconstruction1,2,3,8.
In contrast to previously proposed homelands, which range from the Altai6,7,8 to the Yellow River22 to the Greater Khingan Mountains23 to the Amur basin24, we find support for a Transeurasian origin in the West Liao River region in the Early Neolithic. After a primary break-up of the family in the Neolithic, further dispersals took place in the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. The ancestor of the Mongolic languages expanded northwards to the Mongolian Plateau, Proto-Turkic moved westwards over the eastern steppe and the other branches moved eastwards: Proto-Tungusic to the Amur–Ussuri–Khanka region, Proto-Koreanic to the Korean Peninsula and Proto-Japonic over Korea to the Japanese islands (Fig. 1b).
Through a qualitative analysis in which we examined agropastoral words that were revealed in the reconstructed vocabulary of the proto-languages (Supplementary Data 5), we further identified items that are culturally diagnostic for ancestral speech communities in a particular region at a particular time. Common ancestral languages that separated in the Neolithic, such as Proto-Transeurasian, Proto-Altaic, Proto-Mongolo-Tungusic and Proto-Japano-Koreanic, reflect a small core of inherited words that relate to cultivation (‘field’, ‘sow’, ‘plant’, ‘grow’, ‘cultivate’, ‘spade’); millets but not rice or other crops (‘millet seed’, ‘millet gruel’, ‘barnyard millet’); food production and preservation (‘ferment’, ‘grind’, ‘crush to pulp’, ‘brew’); wild foods suggestive of sedentism (‘walnut’, ‘acorn’, ‘chestnut’); textile production (‘sew’, ‘weave cloth’, ‘weave with a loom’, ‘spin’, ‘cut cloth’, ‘ramie’, ‘hemp’); and pigs and dogs as the only domesticated animals.
By contrast, individual subfamilies that separated in the Bronze Age, such as Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic, inserted new subsistence terms that relate to the cultivation of rice, wheat and barley; dairying; domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and horses; farming or kitchen tools; and textiles such as silk (Supplementary Data 5). These words are borrowings that result from linguistic interaction between Bronze Age populations speaking various Transeurasian and non-Transeurasian languages.
In summary, the age, homeland, original agricultural vocabulary and contact profile of the Transeurasian family support the farming hypothesis and exclude the pastoralist hypothesis (Supplementary Data 5).
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2021 22:49:41 GMT
Archaeology Although Neolithic Northeast Asia was characterized by widespread plant cultivation25, cereal farming expanded from several centres of domestication, the most important of which for Transeurasian was the West Liao basin, where cultivation of broomcorn millet started by 9000 BP26,27,28,29. Extracting data from the published literature, we scored 172 archaeological features for 255 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites (Supplementary Data 6, Fig. 2a) and compiled an inventory of 269 directly carbon-14-dated early crop remains (Supplementary Data 9) in northern China, the Primorye, Korea and Japan. Fig. 2: Spatiotemporal distribution and clustering of sites included in the archaeological database.  a, Geographical distribution of 255 sites from the Neolithic (red) and the Bronze Age (green). b, Coloured dots cluster the investigated sites according to cultural similarity in line with Bayesian analysis in Supplementary Data 25, with indication of the spread of millet and rice in time and space. The distribution of archaeological sites in Fig. 2 is smaller than that of contemporary languages in Fig. 1 because we focus on the early dispersal of the linguistic subgroups in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and on the links between the eastward spread of farming and language dispersal. The main results of our Bayesian analysis (Supplementary Data 25), which clusters the 255 sites according to cultural similarity, are visualized in Fig. 2b. We find a cluster of Neolithic cultures in the West Liao basin, from which two branches associated with millet farming separate: a Korean Chulmun branch and a branch of Neolithic cultures covering the Amur, Primorye and Liaodong. This confirms previous findings about the dispersal of millet agriculture to Korea by 5500 BP and via the Amur to the Primorye by 5000 BP30,31. Our analysis further clusters Bronze Age sites in the West Liao area with Mumun sites in Korea and Yayoi sites in Japan. This mirrors how during the fourth millennium BP, the agricultural package of the Liaodong–Shandong area was supplemented with rice and wheat. These crops were transmitted to the Korean Peninsula by the Early Bronze Age (3300–2800 BP) and from there to Japan after 3000 BP (Fig. 2b). Although population movements were not linked with monothetic archaeological cultures, Neolithic farming expansions in Northeast Asia were associated with some diagnostic features, such as stone tools for cultivation and harvesting and textile technology32 (Supplementary Data 7). Domesticated animals and dairying had an important role in the spread of the Neolithic in western Eurasia but, except for dogs and pigs, our database shows little evidence for animal domestication in Northeast Asia before the Bronze Age (Supplementary Data 6). The link between agriculture and population migrations is especially clear from similarities between ceramics, stone tools, and domestic and burial architecture between Korea and western Japan33. Building on previous studies, we provide an overview of demographic changes associated with the introduction of millet farming across the regions in our study (Extended Data Fig. 3). Having invested in elaborate paddy fields, wet rice farmers tended to stay in one place, absorbing population growth through extra labour, whereas millet farmers typically adopted a more expansionary settlement pattern34. Neolithic population densities increased across Northeast Asia before a population crash in the Late Neolithic 35,36. The Bronze Age then saw exponential population increases in China, Korea and Japan. |
|
