Abstract
Broomcorn and foxtail millets were being cultivated in the West Liao River basin in Northeast China by at least the sixth millennium BCE. However, when and how millet agriculture spread from there to the north and east remains poorly understood. Here, we trace the dispersal of millet agriculture from Northeast China to the Russian Far East and weigh demic against cultural diffusion as mechanisms for that dispersal. We compare two routes for the spread of millet into the Russian Far East discussed in previous research—an inland route across Manchuria, and a coastal/inland route initially following the Liaodong Peninsula and Yalu River—using an archaeological dataset including millet remains, pottery, stone tools, spindle whorls, jade and figurines. We then integrate the archaeological evidence with linguistic and genetic findings in an approach we term ‘triangulation’. We conclude that an expansion of agricultural societies in Northeast China during the Middle to Late Hongshan (40003000 BCE) coincided with the arrival of millet cultivation in eastern Heilongjiang and the Primorye province of the Russian Far East. Our findings support the inland, Manchuria route for the dispersal of millet to the Primorye and suggest that, as well as long-distance cultural exchange, demic diffusion was also involved. Our results are broadly compatible with the farming/language dispersal hypothesis and consistent with a link between the spread of millet farming and proto-Tungusic, the language ancestral to the contemporary Tungusic languages, in late Neolithic Northeast Asia.
Highlights
Further studies on ancient genomic data from the West Liao River basin, Liaodong, the Russian Far East as well as the Korean peninsula will serve as a key to understand agricultural dispersals in Northeast Asia
Linguistic evidence suggests that millet farmers speaking an ancestral form of Tungusic spread beyond the West Liao River basin, moved eastward, and reached the Primorye around 3300 BCE via an inland route distantly removed from the Liaodong peninsula and the coastal areas of the Yellow Sea
We have found genetic similarities between a Neolithic farmer from the West Liao River and hunter–gatherers from the Russian Far East (Ning, 2018a, 2018b)
Summary
Recent research using full genome analyses of human skeletal remains, radiocarbon proxy data for population fluctuations, and chronometric hygiene analyses of excavated plant remains has transformed our understanding of the expansion of agricultural societies in West Asia and Europe (Shennan, 2018). Research in archaeolinguistics is contributing to a deeper understanding of farming dispersals in Northeast Asia, a region which received little attention in previous scholarship (Miyamoto, 2016; Robbeets, 2017a, 2017b, 2020; Robbeets et al, 2020; Sagart et al, 2017; Whitman, 2011). Despite these advances, it has become clear that the expansion of domesticated crops and animals across East Asia was complex. Following the farming/ language dispersals hypothesis (Renfrew, 1987; Bellwood and Renfrew, 2003), it is sometimes possible to propose linguistic correlates for such movements
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