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Paper short abstract:

This paper will integrate linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence on the ultimate origins of Yayoi culture. It will trace Yayoi language, agriculture and genes languages back to the beginning of millet agriculture and the early days of the Amur genome in Northeast China.

Paper long abstract:

The origins of the Japanese language are among the most disputed issues of historical comparative linguistics. Even if the precise nature of its affinity to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic languages remains debated, the hypothesis that Japanese is historically related to these languages is gradually gaining acceptance (Georg et al. 1998, Johanson 2010, Starostin 2016, Robbeets et al. 2020). In my past research, I have shown that shown there is a small core of reliable evidence that enables us to classify Japanese as a Transeurasian language (Robbeets 2005, 2015, 2020 a/b, Robbeets & Bouckaert 2018). Accepting the Transeurasian origins of the Japanese language, however, inevitably gives rise to new questions about who the ancestors of the speakers of Japonic were, where they came from and when, where and why they moved. It is clear that these questions reach far beyond linguistics, into other scientific disciplines such as genetics and archaeology. Here, I will bring these three lines of evidence together in a single approach, for which Bellwood (2002) adopted the term "triangulation". To this end, I will align the datasets, independently generated by linguists, archaeologists and geneticists within the context of my ERC funded eurasia3angle project and point out correlations and discrepancies. The results will trace back the ultimate origins of Yayoi language, agriculture and genes languages to the beginning of millet agriculture within the Xinglongwa culture (6200-5400 BC) and to the early days of the Amur genome in Northeast China. Adding rice and other crops to the agricultural package and admixing with Yellow-River ancestries, the speakers of Japonic are thought to have moved over the Korean Peninsula and reached Japan, where they established Yayoi culture. In this way, my presentation will contribute to a larger view of how human, cultural and linguistic dispersal interacted to shape modern Japan.