An international team of researchers from academic institutions such as Kanazawa University and Tottori University in Japan published a paper in the American scientific journal Science Advances, saying that in the process of analyzing the DNA of human bones from the Kofun period found in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, it was found that kofun DNA contained genetic features that are common in East Asians, which are almost consistent with the genetic characteristics of modern Japanese. This means that the Kofun people may be the direct ancestors of modern Japanese (i.e., from 1945 to the present).
Here, we will briefly understand the history of Japan, before the historical era known in Japanese archaeology. There are also original historical eras, namely the Jomon period, the Yayoi period, and the Kofun period.
The Jomon period is the Neolithic age of Japan, named after the use of Jomon pottery at that time, its culture is called Jomon culture, and the Yayoi period is the era of yayoi pottery used in ancient Japan after the Jomon period and before the Kofun period, and its culture is called Yayoi culture. The Kofun period, the era after the Yayoi period in ancient Japan, was named after the large number of "kofun" built by the ruling class at that time.
General scholars believe that the Yayoi period and the Jomon period of the Japanese archipelago multiplied life of Yayoi and Jomon literati are two types in the human race. The Yayoi culture and Jomon culture they created are also completely different cultures, and there is a relationship between the two of them, that is, the Jomon culture is a culture that is rejected by the Yayoi culture, and the Jomon people are gradually excluded to the edge of the main body of the Japanese archipelago because of the arrival of the Yayoi people.
The Kofun people have a certain connection with the Yayoi people, but there are also differences, according to the doctrine advocated by Japanese experts in 1991, the direct ancestors of modern Japanese may be Yayoi people, that is, jomon people (indigenous people of the Japanese archipelago) and immigrants from the Asian continent.
In other words, how did the modern Japanese come into being? It was the partial fusion of Yayoi and Jomon, and the formation of a unified nation in Japan, which constituted the main civilization of modern Japanese people.
But according to the latest research, many genetic traits common to Northeast Asians were found in the DNA of Yayoi people. On the other hand, the KOfun dna contains genetic traits that are common in East Asians that Yayoi DNA does not possess, and these traits are almost identical to the genetic traits of modern Japanese.
That is to say, the new population produced after the partial fusion of yayoi and Jomon people, they and later came to the Japanese archipelago han immigrants genetic exchange, thus giving birth to the kofun people, and the kofun people constitute the main civilization of modern Japanese. That is, their direct ancestors.
According to previous studies, the early Jomon race had a flatter brow crest, a shallow flat nose root, a high narrow face, round and high eye sockets, and a relatively tall stature, which was closest to the Mongols in Northeast Asia, and was also closely related to the Ainu people, the indigenous peoples who now live on Sakhalin Island and Hokkaido, kuril Islands and Kamchatka.
In the middle of the early Jomon period, the continental shelf was land up to a depth of 100 meters, and The Okayama prefectures and Kagawa prefectures in the Seto Inland Sea were originally connected to the land. About 8,000 years ago, on the southwest coast of the Korean Peninsula, Kyushu in the northwest. Narrow sea gorges appeared between the areas, a terrain suitable for people to migrate from the mainland to the archipelago.
So in the middle of the Jomon period, ancient people from Chinese mainland continued to arrive and settle in the Japanese archipelago, bringing advanced continental cultures and merging with the local inhabitants. Thus, on the skull specimens of ancient inhabitants in the late Jomon period, late period and even in the Jomon period. Various anthropological features appear in skull specimens that are very similar to those of the Ancient Northeast type inhabitants and the ancient South China type inhabitants of China from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
The Yayoi people are actually from the Chinese mainland, representing the yayoi people who were mainly of Watanabe ancestry and fused with a small amount of Jomon ancestry in the Yayoi period, arrived in the Japanese archipelago from two directions. Some of them are derived from the distribution area of the ancient Central Plains type, that is, the North China region dominated by the lower reaches of the Yellow River in China; The other part of them is derived from the distribution area of the ancient northeast type, that is, the northeast Asian continent of northeast China and the Korean Peninsula, with northeast China as the core.
According to a recent paper published in the American scientific journal Science Advances by an international research team composed of academic institutions such as Kanazawa University and Tottori University in Japan, after the Yayoi period, a group of Han Chinese immigrants came to Japan, and they merged with the Yayoi people, who were mainly of Watanabe ancestry and fused with a small amount of Jomon ancestry, thus constituting the theme of modern Japanese civilization.
And where did this group of Han Chinese come from? Since the anthropological materials of the Kofun era are all from large tombs, and the number of tombs in each site is unequal, the human bones in each cemetery are relatively scattered and the number of individuals is small, so scientists have not yet reached a conclusion.
Restoration of the bones of the Kofun people in the image of the infographic
The famous Japanese archaeologist Pogo Esakami once proposed the "theory of conquest of the equestrian nation", about the end of the Yayoi period, a group of horseback peoples from the mainland invaded the Japanese archipelago through the Korean Peninsula and conquered the original farming peoples on the Japanese archipelago and established a new dynasty. Later, they merged with each other and eventually formed the current Japanese nation.
But this theory still needs to wait for further DNA forensics of the human bones of Kofun people to reach a conclusion, and team members at Kanazawa University and Tottori University in Japan also said that it is necessary to increase the number of samples analyzed by human bones and extensively investigate the genes of Kofun and Yayoi to further decipher the mystery of the origin of the Japanese people.
But in summary, according to existing research, modern Japanese may be a mixed-race ethnic group that is based on the blood of the Han chinese in ancient China and integrates the blood of other ethnic groups on the mainland.
In addition to the research of Japanese scientists, Chinese Han Chinese or modern Japanese ancestors, scientists' research also shows that cell research magazine sponsored by the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the first time reported a systematic analysis of high-depth whole genome sequencing data and phenotypes covering 27 provinces and municipalities directly under the central government, 8 ethnic groups, and more than 10,000 people, and one of the results was that the genes of Japanese people completely overlapped with those of northern Han people.
For the results published by the international research team composed of academic institutions such as Kanazawa University and Tottori University in Japan, Japanese netizens said that they were not surprised, and some netizens said that during the change of dynasties in ancient China, the imperial court was in chaos, and as the escape site of former high-ranking officials, the Japanese archipelago was very suitable. In every era, there will be immigrants or refugees from the mainland who come to Japan, and it is reasonable to infer that they have evolved into Japanese.
Some netizens said that if the Same Ethnic Group with China can be accepted, they said that the fact that people in ancient China directly crossed the sea to migrate to Japan can be proved by the DNA analysis of rice, and they have heard of a variety of human characteristics found in the DNA analysis of human bones, and there are still many doubts in The history of Japan. However, the netizen personally advocated that "whether it is the ancestors of the Japanese or the introduction of rice, it is certainly not the origin of the Korean Peninsula."