Spread of Transeurasian languages was due to agriculture

Date:
November 10, 2021
Source:
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Summary:
By triangulating data from linguistics, archaeology and genetics,
a new study by an international team of researchers proposes a
'Farming Hypothesis' for the spread of Transeurasian languages,
tracing the origins of Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and
Turkic to the movements of Neolithic millet farmers from the region
of the West Liao River.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
The origin and early dispersal of Transeurasian languages, including,
among others, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic, is
among the most disputed issues of Asian prehistory. Although many
of the commonalities between these languages are due to borrowing,
recent studies have shown a reliable core of evidence supporting the classification of Transeurasian as a genealogical group, or a group of languages that emerged from a common ancestor. Accepting the ancestral relatedness of these languages and cultures, however, raises questions
about when and where the earliest speakers lived, how the descendant
cultures sustained themselves and interacted with one another, and the
routes of their dispersals throughout the millennia.


==========================================================================
A new paper published in the journal Nature by an international team
that includes researchers from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, Russia and
the Unites States provides interdisciplinary support for the farming
"Farming Hypothesis" of language dispersal, tracing the Transeurasian
languages back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia beginning
in the Early Neolithic. Using newly sequenced genomes, an extensive archaeological database, and a new dataset of vocabulary concepts for
98 languages, they triangulate the time- depth, location and dispersal
routes of ancestral Transeurasian speech communities.

The evidence from linguistic, archeological and genetic sources indicates
that the origins of the Transeurasian languages can be traced back to
the beginning of millet cultivation and the early Amur gene pool in the
region of the West Liao River. During the Late Neolithic, millet farmers
with Amur-related genes spread into contiguous regions across Northeast
Asia. In the millennia that followed, speakers of the daughter branches
of Proto-Transeurasian admixed with Yellow River, western Eurasian and
Jomon populations, adding rice agriculture, western Eurasian crops and pastoralist lifeways to the Transeurasian package.

"Taken by itself, a single discipline alone cannot conclusively resolve
the big questions surrounding language dispersal, but taken together
the three disciplines increase the credibility and validity of this
scenario," says Martine Robbeets, lead author of the study and leader
of the Archaeolinguistic Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for
the Science of Human History.

"By aligning the evidence offered by the three disciplines, we gained
a more balanced and richer understanding of Transeurasian migration
than each of the three disciplines could provide us with individually."
The linguistic evidence used to triangulate came from a new dataset of
more than 3,000 cognate sets representing over 250 concepts in nearly 100 Transeurasian languages. From this, researchers were able to construct a phylogenetic tree which shows the roots of the Proto-Transeurasian family reaching back 9,181 years before the present to millet farmers living
in the region of the West Liao River. A small core of inherited words
related to land cultivation, millets and millet agriculture and other
signs of a sedentary lifestyle further support the Farming Hypothesis.

The team's archaeological results also highlight the West Liao River
basin, where communities started farming broomcorn millet roughly 9,000
years ago.

Bayesian analysis of an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic and
Bronze Age sites, including 269 directly carbon-dated cereals, showed
a cluster of related Neolithic cultures in the West Liao basin, from
which two branches of millet- farming cultures separate: a Korean Chulmun branch and a branch of cultures covering the Amur, Primorye and Liadong.

Analysis further paired sites in the West Liao area with Mumun sites in
Korea and Yayoi sites in Japan, showing the addition of rice and wheat
to the agricultural package in Liadong and Shangdong and their further transmission to the Korean Peninsula in the Early Bronze Age and from
there to Japan around 3,000 years ago.

The new study also reports the first collection of ancient genomes from
Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and early cereal farmers in Japan. Combining
their results with previously published genomes from East Asia, the team identified a common genetic component called "Amur-like ancestry" among
all speakers of Transeurasian languages. They were also able to confirm
that the Bronze Age Yayoi period in Japan saw a massive migration from
the continent at the same time as the arrival of farming.

Taken together, the study's results show that, although masked by
millennia of extensive cultural interaction, Transeurasian languages
share a common ancestry and that the early spread of Transeurasian
speakers was driven by agriculture.

"Accepting that the roots of one's language -- and to an extent one's
culture - - lie beyond present national boundaries can require a kind
of reorientation of identity, and this is not always an easy step for
people to take," says Robbeets. "But the science of human history shows
us that the history of all languages, cultures, and peoples is one of
extended interaction and mixture." The current study shows how the triangulation of linguistic, archaeological and genetic methods can
increase the credibility and validity of a hypothesis, but the authors
are quick to recognize the need for further research. More ancient DNA,
more etymological research and more archaeobotanical research will further deepen our understanding of human migrations in Neolithic Northeast Asia
and untangle the influence of later population movements, of which many
were pastoralist in nature.

"There was far more to the creation of the Transeurasian language
family, as an ultimate whole, than just one primary Neolithic
pulse of migration," says Mark Hudson, an archaeologist in the Archaeolinguistic Research Group. "There is still so much to learn." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Max_Planck_Institute_for_the_Science_of_Human_History.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Martine Robbeets, Remco Bouckaert, Matthew Conte, Alexander
Savelyev, Tao
Li, Deog-Im An, Ken-ichi Shinoda, Yinqiu Cui, Takamune Kawashima,
Geonyoung Kim, Junzo Uchiyama, Joanna Dolińska, Sofia
Oskolskaya, Ken-Yōjiro Yamano, Noriko Seguchi, Hirotaka
Tomita, Hiroto Takamiya, Hideaki Kanzawa-Kiriyama, Hiroki Oota,
Hajime Ishida, Ryosuke Kimura, Takehiro Sato, Jae-Hyun Kim,
Bingcong Deng, Rasmus Bjo/rn, Seongha Rhee, Kyou-Dong Ahn,
Ilya Gruntov, Olga Mazo, John R. Bentley, Ricardo Fernandes,
Patrick Roberts, Ilona R. Bausch, Linda Gilaizeau, Minoru Yoneda,
Mitsugu Kugai, Raffaela A. Bianco, Fan Zhang, Marie Himmel,
Mark J. Hudson, Chao Ning. Triangulation supports agricultural
spread of the Transeurasian languages. Nature, 2021; DOI:
10.1038/s41586-021-04108-8 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211110131625.htm

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