Abstract
The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history1–3. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements4,5. Here we address this question by ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic–Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’6–8, we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture.
Highlights
The linguistic relatedness of the Transeurasian languages— known as ‘Altaic’—is among the most disputed issues in linguistic prehistory
As these issues reach far beyond linguistics, we address them by integrating archaeology and genetics in a single approach termed ‘triangulation’
Triangulation of linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence shows that the origins of the Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the beginning of millet cultivation and the early Amur gene pool in Neolithic Northeast Asia
Summary
These five groups descend from a single common ancestor has been the topic of a long-standing debate between supporters of inheritance and borrowing. Individual subfamilies that separated in the Bronze Age, such as Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic, inserted new subsistence terms that relate to the cultivation of rice, wheat and barley; dairying; domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and horses; farming or kitchen tools; and textiles such as silk (Supplementary Data 5) These words are borrowings that result from linguistic interaction between Bronze Age populations speaking various Transeurasian and non-Transeurasian languages. We lack Early Neolithic genomes in the West Liao River, Amur-like ancestry is likely to represent the original genetic profile of indigenous pre-Neolithic (or late Palaeolithic) hunter-gatherers covering Baikal, Amur, Primorye, the southeastern steppe and West Liao, continuing in the early farmers from this region This contradicts a recent genetic study[13], which concludes that the absence of Yellow River influence in ancient genomes from Mongolia and the Amur does not support the West Liao genetic correlate of the Transeurasian language family. Whereas the Turkic-speaking Xiongnu[38], Old Uyghur and Türk are extremely scattered, the Mongolic-speaking[39] Iron Age Xianbei fall closer to the Amur cluster than the Shiwei, Rouran, Khitan and Middle Mongolian Khanate from Antiquity and the Middle Ages
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