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.

Ancient DNAs of Sus scrofa specimens excavated from archaeological sites on the Okinawa islands were examined to clarify the genetic relationships among prehistoric Sus scrofa, modern wild boars and domestic pigs inhabiting the Ryukyu archipelago, the Japanese islands, and the Asian continent. We extracted remain DNA from 161 bone specimens excavated from 12 archaeological sites on the Okinawa islands and successfully amplified mitochondrial DNA control region fragments from 33 of 161 specimens. Pairwise difference between prehistoric and modern S. scrofa nucleotide sequences showed that haplotypes of the East Asian domestic pig lineage were found from archaeological specimens together with Ryukyu wild boars native to the Ryukyu archipelago. Phylogenetic analysis of 14 ancient sequences (11 haplotypes; 574 bp) indicated that S. scrofa specimens from two Yayoi-Heian sites (Kitahara and Ara shellmiddens) and two Recent Times sites (Wakuta Kiln and Kiyuna sites) are grouped with modern East Asian domestic pigs. Sus scrofa specimens from Shimizu shellmidden (Yayoi-Heian Period) were very closely related to modern Sus scrofa riukiuanus but had a unique nucleotide insertion, indicating that the population is genetically distinct from the lineage of modern Ryukyu wild boars. This genetic evidence suggests that domestic pigs from the Asian continent were introduced to the Okinawa islands in the early Yayoi-Heian period (1700-2000 BP), or earlier.

Homo sapiens sapiens had spread into most diverse environments by the end of the Pleistocene, but many islands were not settled until the Holocene. One explanation is that because of space and resource limitations in many island environments, it was difficult for hunter-gatherers to survive there. Although some islands were colonized successfully by hunter-gatherers, agriculture may have been necessary to settle many islands permanently. Islands successfully colonized by hunter-gatherers were large, close to continents or larger islands, or had abundant marine resources (especially large sea mammals), or a combination of these elements.Relatively small and remote, the Ryukyu Islands south of Japan, were not characterized by the conditions mentioned above. The first humans who successfully colonized the Okinawa group of islands were "Late" Jomon people. In this paper, I examine subsistence strategies of prehistoric Okinawans using recent faunal and floral data, demonstrating that they lived on the islands using a foraging-based economy. In the process, I explore the reasons hunter-gatherers were able successfully to colonize Okinawa island environments for several thousand years.

Introduction Processes of acculturation and assimilation in contact situations have been the subject of considerable interest to North American and Japanese prehistorians alike. In the latter case, research has emphasized the transition, beginning about 1000 BC, to the wet-rice-focussed Yayoi (Akazawa 1981, 1986) (see TABLE1 for plant nomenclature used in this paper). The spread of agriculture to northeastern Japan is usually viewed as a northeastward progression of a frmtier that reached northern Tohoku by the Middle Yayoi (FIGURES 1 & 2). However, the situation is more complex than this, in our view, and involves a spatial and cultural dichotomy between Hokkaido and northern Tohoku on the one hand and southern Tohokusouthwestern Japan on the other. Furthermore, we interpret Ainu culture (as distinct from the Ainu biological population) of Hokkaido and Sakhalin to be an outcome of a long period of social interaction along this boundary.

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