DNA study reveals Japan's 1st inhabitants

Japan is perhaps best known for this giant metal Buddha statue originally built indoors.

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Let's see what the ancient written record says

Were the kami "ancestors" the first to arrive on the islands, followed by Shinto priest-shamans to deal with them? Were the "white" Ainu in Japan before the East Asian Japanese there today? Yes. Were the Ainu aliens from neighboring Russia? No. Or could the first inhabitants of Japan come from the Koreas, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, or Tibet? If only science had a means of looking at the DNA code and giving a reliable and replicable answer to these mysteries.

Genome study cracks the mystery of Japan's first inhabitants

Kami Shinto temple, Fushimi Inari shrine, Kyoto

Some of the earliest inhabitants of Japan came from the Korean peninsula, according to a new study that sheds more light on ancient immigration patterns to the archipelago.

• [This is in line with what the Koreans have always been saying about themselves, that they were the progenitors copied by Japan and China, not the other way around. Where did the Koreans come from?]

Japan may be an international travel hub for business and pleasure today, but the islands were relatively isolated until about 3,000 BC.

Its earliest inhabitants were the Jomon people, a collection of hunter-gatherer societies that lived an isolated life on the islands since 14,000 BC.

• [What about the mysterious "white" Ainu people, who look like a blend of Russian shamans and Asians?]

It wasn’t until the Yayoi and Kofun periods between 3,000 BC and 538 AD that immigration to the islands from continental Asia started.

More than 80 per cent of the genomes of modern Japanese people consist of ancestries related to East and Northeast Asia. How the Japanese population acquired these ancestries and what was the pattern of early immigrations that contributed to them has long been a matter of debate.

Science has its say

The new study, published in the Journal of Human Genetics, analyzed the genome of a person dating to the Yayoi period whose remains were uncovered at the Doigahama archaeological site in Yamaguchi prefecture.

Scientists from the University of Tokyo compared this individual’s genome with those of ancient and modern populations in east and northeast Asia. More:

• Genome study cracks the mystery of Japan's first inhabitants
• Archaeologists are too scared to open up the tomb of China's first emperor guarded by thousands of terracotta warriors Archaeologists are terrified to open the tomb of, in the Shaanxi province of China.
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• MSN.com, 10/14/24; CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly