A new study combining linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence has traced the origins of the family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian and the people who speak them to millet (粟) farmers who inhabited a region in northeastern China about 9, 000 years ago.
The findings detailed on Wednesday document a shared genetic ancestry for the hundreds of millions of people who speak what the researchers call Transeurasian languages across an area stretching more than 8, 000 kilometers.
The findings illustrate how humankind's embrace of agriculture following the Ice Age powered the movements of some of the world's major language families. Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.
There are 98 Transeurasian languages. This language family's beginnings were traced to millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area including parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across northeastern Asia, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and east into Korea and over the sea to Japan over thousands of years.
The research stressed the complex beginnings for modern populations and cultures.
"Accepting that the roots of one's language, culture or people lie beyond the present national boundaries is a kind of surrender of identity, which some people are not yet prepared to make," said comparative linguist Martine Robbeets, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
"Powerful nations such as Japan, Korea and China are often pictured as representing one language, one culture and one genetic profile. But a truth is that all languages, cultures and humans, including those in Asia, are mixed," Robbeets added.
The origins of modem Chinese languages arose independently, though in a similar fashion, with millet also involved. While the ancestors of the Transeurasian languages grew millet in the Liao River valley, the originators of the Sino-Tibetan language family farmed millet at roughly the same time in China's Yellow River region, paving the way for a separate language expansion.
