Ainu people

[Anders Hoveland]

The latest DNA evidence seems to support the theory that the Ainu originated from the same incredibly ancient line related to the Australian Aborigines.
Indeed, the only regions of the world that share the same exact Haplogroup D as the Ainu are in the disparate regions Tibet and Burma (a very light scattering of Haplogroup D) and, very bizarrely, the Andaman Islands. (The Andaman Islanders are a black-skinned group who probably are representative of the population who once occupied Southern Asia all the way from India to Thailand, remnants of whom still survived in a few very isolated places, classified into their own ethnic group "Nigritos")
I don't have to tell you how incredibly ancient this is. The dispersal of these people would have been before the Dravidian group inhabited India, and before Mongoloid groups inhabited East Asia. (Indian and Chinese cultures are very ancient, so this is extremely far back into prehistory)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFohbr7ALeQ

There is also a very light distribution of Haplogroup D stretching East from the Lake Baikal (Siberia) towards Sakhalin Island (located just North of Hokkaido).
This might parallel other genetic studies that show the ancient Yayoi people of Japan were a mix of about half Siberian populations from around Lake Baikal and about half populations from the Southern Chinese coastal region of Zhejiang.

This does not necessarily rule out other additional origins for the Ainu, but it does show that they descend at least in part (if not mainly) from a very ancient group that was one of the first out of Africa.

[Anders Hoveland]

Ainu people are enigmatic. They have an isolate language and culture. They lived mostly in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, Kuril islands and parts of Siberia
During the study of Tajima (2004), 87.5% of tested Ainu belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup D2

They have a primitive look, some of them look caucasian, other look austroloid, other look protomongoloid.
Currently scientists think that Ainu are a mix of protomongoloid siberian from the north and Jomon from the south

Haplogroup D is highly concentrated in the Andaman Islands, with very light distributions in Tibet/Burma and a stretch between Lake Baikal in Siberia to Sakhalin island.
I would guess that Haplogroup D is indicative of one of the first waves out of Africa. These are the Negrito people, who probably in the very distant past inhabited the entire stretch of South Asia, before Indian culture existed in India and before Mongoloids came from the North to inhabit China. So this would be incredibly far back on the timeline. (The Negritos only survive in some isolated places, like the Andaman Islands, and up until the early Twentieth Century certain remote mountain villages in Burma and Thailand. There is also a darker minority ethnic group (Dravidian) in the South of India who probably draw descent from this group.)

So this population, I would suggest, probably reached the area East of Lake Baikal, in Siberia, very long ago, by way of Southern Asia, and then from there entered Northern Japan.

Along the way there may have been some level of mixing.

I'm not very sure of the timeline here (it's very likely this could be completely implausible) but it's possible that by the time the Nigrito/Dravidian group left India there had already been some degree of admixture from a Caucasian population. (I'm not sure if this is possible because the timeline would require this to have happened before Mongoloids inhabited China, and it's unknown if Caucasians had entered into India at that far back prehistoric time, although they certainly did enter later) This would be coming out of Northern India, so there could have been a higher mixture of Caucasian than in the South, although the population was still probably much more Nigrito. Some of the dark Dravidians in the South of India today have slight Caucasian-like features (although that was likely due to later mixing; the South of India was separated by a geographic barrier from the North, a strip of desert and jungle).
I'm just proposing this as one possibility whereby some Caucasian origin could have found its way into the Ainu. Take from it what you will.

Then this population still has to entire into Siberia. I'm not sure how they did that. The light scattering of D Haplogroup in Tibet and Burma could be indicative of the path they traveled, or it could just be representative of the remnants of a much wider group that used to inhabit the whole area before they were later displaced or diluted out of existence.

Along the way, in Siberia, it's very likely there was some amount admixture from Mongoloids. This would not have been as much mixing as there was later, while the Ainu were in Japan. So the Ainu were likely already at least part Mongoloid in their heritage by the time they were entering Northern Japan.

Melanesians and Australian aborigines are presumably both offshoots of, and closely related to Nigritos.

If this is all true, then it could well be that the Ainu are practically equivalent to mix between austroloid, mongoloid, and (disputably) possibly a little bit Caucasian.

All this would span a very ancient time in history. (Probably long before 3000 BC)

It is believed that Ainu were entering Japan from the North at the same time others (progenitors of modern-day Japanese culture) were entering the country from the South. Naturally, there probably was some degree of genetic admixture, happening slowly over time, such that the entire Japanese population may have a small amount of Ainu descent, and even more admixture the other way. (I don't want to overestimate the amount of mixing though, on the whole the two groups probably stayed mostly to themselves, but over a very long time period even a very small rate of mixing can start to add up). The change probably accelerated during the Nara period (8th century) when the very Northern territories began to be conquered.

My guess would be that at the very start of the Jomon period, while culture had barely yet developed (before rice agriculture came to Japan), there was already mixture between the Chinese-origin Japanese and the Siberian-origin peoples (presumably the same as the Ainu), such that the Jomon may have been a mix of possibly around 30-40 percent Ainu, which stabilized at some point (when the culture developed) and then become separate and distinct from the more pure Ainu further North.

Most of this is very speculative, of course, I'm just trying to piece together the history into a coherent narrative.

[Iloko]

The Jomon are Proto-Mongoloid. See in this tree below how they form a common linking branch with the Papuan:

[Anders Hoveland]

Look up the Negritos in the Philippines. They're believed to be the original inhabitants of the islands, but are today outnumbered 2000 to 1 by Asian ethnic peoples. They've been rapidly disappearing since the Spanish took control over the territory (450 years ago).


" Semangs just like the negarito Aetas of Philippines, Andamaneses of India and other black tribes in Asia today are the remnants of the Homo Sapiens of African origin (blacks), who migrated out of Africa from about 80,000 to 70,000 years ago. The Africans migrated along the coast of Arabia to West Asia to India; a branch continued across the major islands off Asia -- Indonesia, Borneo, Papua New Guinea -- and some as far as Australia, marking the first major sea crossing of humans; a branch continued along the coast of Asia to West Asia to China; from China a branch went westward into Central Asia, and then some southward into Southeast Asia, particularly India, while a branch continued westward into Europe, these together forming the Indo-European group and then the last major group went from China across the Bering Straight into North America and from there some continued into South America. "
https://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane....atives-of.html

The whole region of Asia probably used to look very different a long time ago, and now all these negrito groups (or in some cases remnants of their genetic ancestry) only survive in isolated areas.
They formed minority groups all across Asia but have been rapidly disappearing since the start of the Twentieth Century. A lot of the tribes that were documented by early ethnographers (in the 1930s) are already gone.

[Anders Hoveland]

Do Japanese people have a significant Ainu influence in their looks?

A lot of it comes down to semantics about what you mean by 'Ainu influence'.
Significant, yes, substantial, no. The Japanese definitely look distinct from Chinese and Koreans.

The leading genetic theory is that somewhere around 40-60% of Japanese ancestry came from approximately the present-day Zhejiang area of China.

I can see this, when looking at the faces of the Japanese population it looks like about 40% have characteristics more reminiscent of Southern Chinese.

A little bit of background might be somewhat important to bring up here. In ancient times Chinese civilization sprang up around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. In later dynasties ethnic groups from the North moved in and mixed with the population, while the original Chinese had already moved South, and to a much lesser extent mixed with the ethnic groups there (always it was a Chinese man and ethnic woman).
So none of the Chinese today look exactly like the people of the original Chinese civilization, most likely. And today these ethnic differentiations are no longer recognized and no longer exist along clear lines, for a long time they have all regarded as the same Chinese ethnic group, although of course the Chinese in the North tend to look a little different from the Chinese in the South.

The faces of these 40% Japanese are reminiscent particularly of the Southern Chinese, not the Northern Chinese.

I would also say the Japanese also tend to be, to a lesser extent, reminiscent of Koreans, but maybe only 30%, going just by looks. That's much less than one would expect based on the simple geography.
Koreans are pretty similar to Northern Chinese, although a little bit unique generally. I don't think a Korean would be able to reliably tell the difference between a single Northern Chinese face and a Korean face, although they might be able to guess if there was a group of them.

As for "Ainu influence", just going by looks I would say that the Japanese look like they have about 30-40% influence from something similar to Ainu, with some Japanese looking a little bit more that way than others. I think there may still be a little bit of genetic heterogeneity in the Japanese population, the mixing hasn't been completely even. Maybe 40% look more like the "Southern Chinese" type, while another 45% look more like the "Ainu-Japanese" type. (by "Ainu-Japanese" that doesn't mean they look like the Ainu, just reminiscent of some of their features)

Koreans appear to have some "Ainu" influence as well, but to a lesser extent than the Japanese, maybe only 15%, although the more attractive popstars are more likely to have it (maybe 25%).

These are all just personal opinions.

[arkas]

Really interesting, apparently my R30 maternal haplogroup is the same maternal haplogroup found amongst the first peoples in Japan, probably found amongst the Ainu, Ryukyuan and maybe Jomon people?

At a later time depth, but still in a time inaccessible to historical linguistics, the first anatomically modern humans to populate Japan bore the mitochondrial haplogroup R30 and the Y chromosomal haplogroup D2 to the archipelago. The paternal subclade D2 is specific to Japan, but immediately related to this clade are the ancient D lineages preserved on the Andaman Islands and in the Himalayan region.The highest frequency of D is retained in Japan amongst the Ainu and the Ryūkyūan populations (Hammer et al. 2006), and this paternal lineage accounts for over a third of Japanese paternal lineages. Both the mitochondrial lineage R30 and the Y chromosomal haplogroup D2 indicate that this first wave of peopling of Japan originated in the Indian subcontinent at a time depth of perhaps 25,000 years ago.

From a study I read on East Asian ethno-linguistucs by George van Driem, also mentioned dna.

[Deneb]

They look like a Papuan/Siberian mixture. Some of them have a pseudo caucasian look.

[TheOldNorth]

[QUOTE=Tatar;3522281]Some modern Ainu

I could have sworn that this guy was a white guy dressed up or something

[TheOldNorth]

Haplogroup D is highly concentrated in the Andaman Islands, with very light distributions in Tibet/Burma and a stretch between Lake Baikal in Siberia to Sakhalin island.
I would guess that Haplogroup D is indicative of one of the first waves out of Africa. These are the Negrito people, who probably in the very distant past inhabited the entire stretch of South Asia, before Indian culture existed in India and before Mongoloids came from the North to inhabit China. So this would be incredibly far back on the timeline. (The Negritos only survive in some isolated places, like the Andaman Islands, and up until the early Twentieth Century certain remote mountain villages in Burma and Thailand. There is also a darker minority ethnic group (Dravidian) in the South of India who probably draw descent from this group.)

So this population, I would suggest, probably reached the area East of Lake Baikal, in Siberia, very long ago, by way of Southern Asia, and then from there entered Northern Japan.

Along the way there may have been some level of mixing.

I'm not very sure of the timeline here (it's very likely this could be completely implausible) but it's possible that by the time the Nigrito/Dravidian group left India there had already been some degree of admixture from a Caucasian population. (I'm not sure if this is possible because the timeline would require this to have happened before Mongoloids inhabited China, and it's unknown if Caucasians had entered into India at that far back prehistoric time, although they certainly did enter later) This would be coming out of Northern India, so there could have been a higher mixture of Caucasian than in the South, although the population was still probably much more Nigrito. Some of the dark Dravidians in the South of India today have slight Caucasian-like features (although that was likely due to later mixing; the South of India was separated by a geographic barrier from the North, a strip of desert and jungle).
I'm just proposing this as one possibility whereby some Caucasian origin could have found its way into the Ainu. Take from it what you will.

Then this population still has to entire into Siberia. I'm not sure how they did that. The light scattering of D Haplogroup in Tibet and Burma could be indicative of the path they traveled, or it could just be representative of the remnants of a much wider group that used to inhabit the whole area before they were later displaced or diluted out of existence.

Along the way, in Siberia, it's very likely there was some amount admixture from Mongoloids. This would not have been as much mixing as there was later, while the Ainu were in Japan. So the Ainu were likely already at least part Mongoloid in their heritage by the time they were entering Northern Japan.

Melanesians and Australian aborigines are presumably both offshoots of, and closely related to Nigritos.

If this is all true, then it could well be that the Ainu are practically equivalent to mix between austroloid, mongoloid, and (disputably) possibly a little bit Caucasian.

All this would span a very ancient time in history. (Probably long before 3000 BC)

It is believed that Ainu were entering Japan from the North at the same time others (progenitors of modern-day Japanese culture) were entering the country from the South. Naturally, there probably was some degree of genetic admixture, happening slowly over time, such that the entire Japanese population may have a small amount of Ainu descent, and even more admixture the other way. (I don't want to overestimate the amount of mixing though, on the whole the two groups probably stayed mostly to themselves, but over a very long time period even a very small rate of mixing can start to add up). The change probably accelerated during the Nara period (8th century) when the very Northern territories began to be conquered.

My guess would be that at the very start of the Jomon period, while culture had barely yet developed (before rice agriculture came to Japan), there was already mixture between the Chinese-origin Japanese and the Siberian-origin peoples (presumably the same as the Ainu), such that the Jomon may have been a mix of possibly around 30-40 percent Ainu, which stabilized at some point (when the culture developed) and then become separate and distinct from the more pure Ainu further North.

Most of this is very speculative, of course, I'm just trying to piece together the history into a coherent narrative.

It’s theorized by most that Dravidians came to India from the Middle East not long before the indo-aryans arrived

[billErobreren]

They look like a Papuan/Siberian mixture. Some of them have a pseudo caucasian look.

This one certainly does