Do Koreans even exist? part 3. Soil

3. Soil

해 뜨는 동해에서 해 지는 서해까지

From the sun rising in the East Sea to the sun setting in the West Sea,

뜨거운 남도에서 광활한 만주벌판

From the searing Southern islands to the boundless Manchurian plains,

우리 어찌 가난하리오 우리 어찌 주저하리오

How could we even consider ourselves poor? Why should we ever permit ourselves to hesitate?

다시 서는 저 들판에서 움켜쥔 뜨거운 흙이여

Once again we stand upon those vast plains, burning soil clenched tightly in our fists.

- 광야에서, Kim Kwang-seok (written by An Chi-hwan) -

This is the chorus from one of my favorite songs, 광야에서. It takes me back to my college years. Fond memories of tear gas, riot police, random street searches, molotov cocktails. A time when I still believed that justice and freedom was something we should fight for. 광야에서 means "from the vast plains" and it was one of the most popular protest songs of the era. I learned it, like most of my protest songs, from bootlegged cassette tapes.

But the lyrics don't actually have anything in them that sound pro-communist, pro-North Korean, or even remotely anti-government. So to this day, I'm not sure why the government censored it. It reads more like a geography test than anything else.

But that chorus line, with that rising melody, still brings a lump to my throat.

From the East Sea.

To the West Sea.

From the Southern Islands.

To the Manchurian Plains.

In Korea we say East → West → South → North, not North → South → East → West. And I always anticipated the climax of the song as it hit the part about the Manchurian Plains.

Anyhoot. Soil.

As I said, 광야에서 is a pretty accurate depiction of Korean geography.

Not the Korean Peninsula, but the "Korea" burned into our soul.

East Coast

Maritime temperate, milder/wetter in winter than equivalent west-coast latitudes.

West Coast

Continental/monsoonal, colder and drier in winter.

Jeju and the Southern Coast

Warm maritime/subtropical edge.

Songnen Plains (Manchurian plains)

Cold continental monsoon plain, grading from semi-humid east to semi-arid west.

Mountains everywhere.

From Hallasan in the south to Baekdusan in the north.

The Jangbaek/Changbai as the head.

The Taebaek as the spine.

Narrow east-coast plains.

Broad western and southern farmland.

Sea to Sea, Halla to Baekdu, Islands to Manchuria, with a mountain spine holding it together.

- ה -

The story so far

Until now we've talked about Blood (DNA), and Words (Language). It's time to bring in the next set of tools at our disposal: Soil (climate, geography, territory, and land), Stuff (artifacts) and Books (written historical records). It's important to note that this isn't the first time Soil, Stuff and Books have appeared in the story. They've been with us throughout the journey. Now, they become the main actors.

What Blood (DNA) tells us:

DNA mutations provide us with markers that we can use to identify paternal, maternal lineages and general relationships between peoples.

Y-DNA (paternal):
O2-M122 (44.27%), O1b2-M176 (31.42%), C2-M217 (12.25%), N-M231 (4.55%), O1a-M119 (2.17%), D1a2a-M55 (1.58%), Q-M242 (1.38%), R-M207 (0.4%), C1a1-M8 (0.2%), O1b1-M95 (0%), Other (1.78%).
→ Every other haplogroup occurs in other populations. O1b2-M176 is the interesting one, appearing in large numbers only in Koreans and Japanese.
→ Another anomaly is the very low incidence of D1a2a-M55 (1.58%), since it makes you wonder why the Jeulmun people disappeared from the peninsula.

mtDNA (maternal):
D (32.4%), B (14.6%), M7(10.3%), G (10.3%), F (9.7%), A (8.1%), Other (~14.6%).
→ The most interesting thing about our moms is how similar they are to everyone else, unlike our dads. Why did our most ancient moms remain, while our oldest dads disappeared?

Autosomal (all DNA):
While each individual Y-DNA and mtDNA marker exists elsewhere throughout Asia, modern Koreans form a statistically distinguishable, Korea-shaped autosomal cluster. And when ancient DNA is used to ask where that cluster came from, the trail again points north, toward Northeast China and the Liao River world.

Liaoning. Again.

What Words (Language) tell us:

Like DNA, the structure of language and the words our ancestors left behind allow us to see similarities, differences, and patterns of different languages. Like Blood, Words don't appear out of nowhere. They leave traces.

Before roughly 1500 BCE, we have essentially no direct evidence telling us what languages were spoken across Korea and the surrounding region. There were almost certainly many of them.

Somewhere north of the peninsula, the ancestry of Japonic and Koreanic disappears into the linguistic fog of Manchuria. Some theories trace their deeper ancestry toward the West Liao River and Liaoning, either directly or through a larger Transeurasian language family.

At some point, Japonic and Koreanic became two of the major languages of the Korean Peninsula. Exactly when each arrived, and which came first, is still being argued. One influential theory places Japonic-speaking agricultural populations on the peninsula before the southward expansion of Koreanic. Others claim Koreanic came first.

Around 1000–300 BCE, Japonic crossed the strait into Japan, with populations moving from the Korean Peninsula triggering the transition of Yayoi agriculture to wet rice. There it spread through the descendants of the Jōmon, eventually becoming Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages. Ainu survived in the north.

From roughly 900 BCE through 500 CE, as Yayoi culture and its descendants spread from Kyushu across the Japanese archipelago, Japonic spread with them and most of the older Jōmon languages disappeared. Ainu survived in the north, carrying forward part of that older linguistic world.

Back on the Peninsula, from roughly 300 BCE through 700 CE, Koreanic spread southward and gradually replaced Japonic. By the Unified Silla period, Koreanic dominated most of the peninsula, leaving behind tantalizing traces of Japonic in old place names and possibly other substrate material.

Liaoning. Again.

- ה -

The Story of Soil (흙; 土)

There are few things in this world that conjure up as much emotion as Soil. It feeds us. It grounds us. It’s where we start our families. We bleed for it. We die in it.

It is home.

But within the context of our journey of finding Korean People, what is soil?

First, Soil bears us food.

Second, Soil is what we protect, and take from others.

Third, Soil defines 'Us'.

For most of human history, Soil was where food was.

Pick enough berries:

→ berries run out.

Gather enough shellfish:

→ shellfish run out.

Hunt enough game:

→ game runs out (plus game moves away: game needs soil too).

Even after animals were domesticated, the problem remained:

→ animals need grass.

→ grass runs out.

→ you move the animals.

And so it was in and around the Korean Peninsula for hundreds of thousands of years.

Let's assume a family/clan of around 50 people. Each adult in the clan would need around 2,500 kcal per person per day, or 45 million kcal every year just to remain alive. For hunter-gatherers, what you gather and hunt gets depleted, and in the winter a lot of it disappears. So in order to survive they needed to move to where food is.

So 50 people might require:

Hunting-heavy foragers: ~1,250 km², 0.04 people/km²
Mixed/gathering-rich foraging: ~260 km², 0.19 people/km²*
Exceptionally rich coast / fisheries: ~50 km², 1.0 people/km²

Steppe pastoralists herding sheep and goats began appearing around 4000–3000 BCE.

Those same 50 people would require:

Songnen-type rich meadow steppe: ~50 km²*
Ordinary dry steppe: ~150 km²
Very dry/desert steppe: ~500 km²

* I bolded the two types of subsistence-based ecologies most relevant to our story and most likely to have occurred in and around Korea.

Humans harvested what the land produced and allowed.

Soil constrained people. People had not yet learned how to constrain the Soil.

And unless they were exceptionally lucky and lived near an exceptionally bountiful coast,

They moved.

- ה -

Let's mark the great Rivers.

Starting from southern China we have the Yangtze River (양쯔강, 揚子江), Huai River (회하, 淮河), and the Yellow River (황하, 黃河), the great river systems that formed the cradle of Chinese civilization.

Flowing through modern Liaoning is the Liao River (요하, 遼河), which empties into the Bohai Sea.

But the Liao is really the downstream end of a much larger river system. To the northwest, the Xar Moron River (시라무렌강; 西拉木倫河) and Laoha River join to form the West Liao River, creating the great river corridor through Chifeng and the eastern Inner Mongolian plains. This was the world of Xinglongwa, Hongshan, and later Xiajiadian Cultures.

South of that lies the Daling River (다릉라; 大凌河), flowing through western Liaoning toward the Bohai. The Hongshan world straddled both the West Liao and Daling river valleys, with major ritual centers such as Niuheliang in the Daling basin.

Further north are the Nen River (넌장/눈강, 嫩江), the Songhua River (송화강, 松花江), and the Amur River (흑룡강, 黑龍江), forming the great northern river world of what we would later call Manchuria. The Nen and Songhua define the Songnen Plain, while the Mudan River (목단강, 牡丹江) drains the southeastern Changbai side into the Songhua, and the Ussuri River (우수리강, 烏蘇里江) joins the Amur farther east. Today, the Amur also marks much of the border between China and Russia.

Moving south toward the Korean Peninsula, we encounter the Amnok/Yalu River (압록강, 鴨綠江) and the Duman/Tumen River (두만강, 豆滿江). The Amnok forms the border between North Korea and China, while the Tumen forms the northeastern border with China and, near its mouth, a tiny sliver of the border between North Korea and Russia.

Farther south are four of the Korean Peninsula’s other major rivers: the Daedong River (대동강, 大同江) through Pyongyang, the Han River (한강, 漢江) through Seoul, the Geum River (금강, 錦江) draining the southwest, and the Nakdong River (낙동강, 洛東江) draining the southeast.

To our ancient forefathers, rivers are not just flowing water.

They fed us.
They blocked us.
They guided us through otherwise difficult terrain.

They were where people hunted.

Where they settled.

Where they passed through.

Then come the Mountains:

The Yan Mountains (연산산맥; 燕山) help separate the North China Plain from Liaoning.
The Greater Khingan Mountains (대흥안령산맥; 大興安嶺) divide the Mongol steppe from the river basins of Manchuria.
The Cheonsan/Qian Mountains (천산산맥; 千山山脈), along with the eastern Liaoning highlands, help funnel movement from Liaoning toward the Korean Peninsula.
The Jangbaek/Changbai Mountains (장백산맥; 長白山脈) form the great mountainous highlands between the Songnen-Manchurian plains and the northern Korean Peninsula.
The Taebaek Mountains (태백산맥; 太白山脈) that form the spine.
The Sobaek Mountains (소백산맥; 小白山脈) that split the southern peninsula.

Like rivers, mountains defined how people lived, and how they moved.

What food was available.
Whether animals could graze.
How easy it was to travel from one place to another.

We humans are literally defined by mountains and rivers.

- ה -

Even the Soil Moved

We keep talking about the “Korean Peninsula” as though it were a permanent piece of geography.

It wasn't.

At the end of the Ice Age (c. 18,000), enormous pieces of what we now call the Yellow Sea was firm soil, not open water.

People lived on it.

Hunted on it.

Gathered on it.

Followed rivers across it.

Without agriculture, they had to roam far and wide.

Many lived in the fertile plain that is now the Yellow Sea.

and from there,

Some made their way into Korea.

Some eventually reached Japan.

And then the ice melted and the ocean swallowed it around ~9700 BCE.

Korea became a peninsula.

Japan became an island.

People that happened to be there got stuck there.

People on Korean soil.

People on Japanese soil.

Not yet Koreans, not yet Japanese.

People who happened to live on that Soil.

Korea remained a corridor.

Japan became a container.

- ה -

When Soil whispers through Blood and Words

Around 12,000 BCE, the people of East Asia fell into geographic worlds shaped by those same mountains and rivers.

Hunter-gatherers separated by Rivers and Mountains.

North China
Baikal / Eastern Steppe
Amur-Prioyre

And where they all mixed,

Liaoning. Again.

At this time, the Yellow Sea was still an inland plain.

Korea and Japan were mountains to the east.

People roamed everywhere.

And they mixed.

Now if we overlay what we know about their DNA, and the fog begins to lift, just a little.

Y-DNA:

C and C2 are strongly northern
N is southern

mtDNA:

D is everywhere, especially in the north
B is strongly southern
G is strongly northeastern

Korean soil has given us almost no usable DNA from this period, but it is reasonable to imagine that the people living on and around the Korean Peninsula were not isolated from these surrounding worlds.

People living on what is now the Yellow Sea plain could move east toward Korea.
North China populations could move east into the Yellow Sea plain, and northeast into Liaoning.
Amur–Primorye populations could move south into Liaoning and toward Korea. These same people could also move into Japan.
Baikal / Eastern Steppe populations could move southeast into Liaoning.

And then something remarkable happened across China.

- ה -

They planted crops

People began making Soil produce food.

In the south, around the Yangtze, it was rice.

In northern China, the first major crop was millet: foxtail millet and broomcorn millet.

We can watch it spreading through early farming communities across northern China:

Cishan, c. 8000–7000 BCE
Peiligang, c. 7000–5000 BCE
Yangshao, c. 5000–3000 BCE

But also near the Liao River:

Xinglongwa, c. 6200–5400 BCE

We are still unsure whether millet farming moved north, or whether people around the Liao River simply figured it out for themselves. Considering climate, I tend to believe it started independently in the north. Just makes logical sense.

These farming communities around the Yellow River eventually became part of the deep foundation of what we know today as Chinese civilization.

By around 3500 BCE, millet farming appeared on the Korean Peninsula.

It may not have arrived alone.

Ancient DNA suggests that populations related to the West Liao River world also contributed ancestry to Neolithic Korea, a world represented over time by the Hongshan culture (~4500–3000 BCE), the Xiaoheyan culture (~3000–2000 BCE), and the Lower Xiajiadian culture (~2200–1400 BCE).

And the people growing it were making Jeulmun (빗살무늬) pottery, strange-looking vessels with pointed bottoms and distinctive comb-like designs. They were part of what archaeologists call:

Jeulmun Culture

They travelled south, deep into the Korean Peninsula, leaving their traces everywhere: from Gungsanri and Jitapri in the northwest, to Amsadong along the Han River in the west, Osanri on the east coast, and Dongsamdong in Busan in the south.

They weren't yet farmers in the way we normally imagine farmers.

They still hunted.

They still fished.

They still gathered.

They had simply learned how to make the Soil do some of the work.

- ה -

Farming changed everything.

For the first time, humans don't merely take food from the soil.

They made the soil produce food.

Same 50 people:

Mixed/gathering-rich foraging: ~260 km²

→ Millet agriculture: ~0.5 km²

→ and later wet Rice agriculture: ~0.08 km²

Moving was no longer required, at least for food.

(1) Early Cultivation:

Clear some ground.

Throw some seeds

Come back and harvest what grows.

→ more food than before

→ but not enough

You still hunt.

You still fish.

You still gather.

Approximate calories from farming:

~35–90 million kcal/km²

→ 1 km² of fields support ~38-99 people per km²

Fifty hunter-gatherers might range across an area 16 km from one side to the other.

And when the field becomes exhausted:

⇒ You still move.

(2) Field Agriculture:

Clear the land properly.

Work the soil.

Plant deliberately.

Weed.

Select better seeds.

Store the harvest.

→ higher yield

→ enough food to stay

Now something important happens.

You have invested labor in this particular patch of soil.

Leaving means abandoning:

your field,
your house,
your storage pits,
your harvest.

Approximate calories from farming:

~90–150 million kcal/km²

→ 1 km² of fields support ~99-164 people per km²

Fifty millet farmers can theoretically get their staple calories from fields fitting inside less than a kilometer square.

Soil no longer merely feeds you.

It sustains you.

⇒ You have something someone wants. You want to protect what you have.

(3) Wet-rice agriculture:

Then humans begin doing something much more extreme.

They reshape the land itself.

Level fields.
Build paddies.
Divert water.
Dig irrigation channels.
Drain excess water.
Build embankments.
Protect fields from flooding.

Now food does not merely grow on the land.

The land has been engineered to produce food.

And that requires people to work together.

Who controls the water?
Who repairs the embankment?
Who decides when everyone plants?
Who guards the stored grain?
Who stops the people next door from taking it?

Approximate calories from farming:

~300 million kcal/km²

→ 1 km² of fields support ~329 people per km²

Fifty wet-rice farmers can compress that even further to roughly half a kilometer square of productive paddies.

The more productive the soil becomes:

→ the more valuable it becomes

→ the more there is to steal

→ the more there is to protect

⇒ Organization and social stratification appear.

Symbols of stratification begin to appear.

Dolmens and elaborate tombs

Prestige objects.

Defensive fortifications.

And eventually:

Soil feeds us.

↓

Soil sustains us.

↓

We made this soil sustain us.

↓

This is our soil.

↓

This is Us.

And as people settled, multiplied, moved, fought, and mixed, they also changed the DNA of the people living on that soil.

- ה -

Guarded by jealous mountains

Some countries have mountains.

Korea is a mountain with some flat land.

In fact, 75% of the Korean Peninsula is mountainous.

The Jangbaek/Changbai highlands form the massive head facing the great plains to the north.

The Rangrim and Hamgyong ranges carry those highlands through northern Korea.

The Taebaek forms the long eastern spine,

with the Sobaek branching southwest across the southern peninsula.

Baekdusan (Mt. Baekdu) at 2,744m, anchors the north.

Hallasan (Mt. Halla) at 1,947m, anchors the south.

And the mountains are massive.

The mountains dictate:

where you can live.

how you can travel.

where you can invade.

where you can defend.

what, when and where you can plant seed.

The map above represents this. Look for this, plains and mountains:

Once you leave the massive plains of the Songhua-Liao World, you don't have a lot of places that can support a large population:

Hug the west coast. That's your best bet. You can plant and you can access the bounties of the West Sea.
Find the major rivers; the Amnok/Yalu, the Daedong, the Han, the Geum, the Nakdong.
Work yourself down south to the Honam/Hoseo plains.
Find a large enough valley in between the mountains.
Or stick to the very narrow strip of land between the Taebaek Range and the East coast

That's basically it.

The mountains are harsh to invaders and strangers.

But surprisingly kind to those who know and respect them.

Countless edible plants, roots and medicinal herbs, can be found if you know where to find them. Wild boar and deer to hunt, tigers and bears to fear (although sadly both are near extinction).

The mountains reluctantly provided, when the previous year's harvests started dwindling in Spring.

Never enough, just enough to tide you over to the barley harvest.

Knowing the mountains was the difference between surviving, and starving to death.

So people learned to forage and preserve.

To pickle and ferment.

To make edible what normally wasn't.

To this day, mountain herbs and vegetables that no other culture would consider putting on the dinner table are staples of Korean cuisine: bracken fern, various wild asters, thistle, shepherd's purse, mugwort, wild chive, young aralia shoots, bellflower root, bonnet bellflower root, water dropwort, daylily shoots, plus mushrooms, seaweeds, and all manner of other vegetables you can pick.

Wut?

Exactly.

Mostly vegetables.

Some rice.

Meat and fish, rarely.

The Korean meal.

People used to call it famine food.

Millennials call it being a locavore.

The humble acorn.

Favorite of squirrels and chipmunks.

You'd be surprised to learn that acorns used to be a staple food for ancient humans living near oak trees. Evidence of human consumption goes back thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of years.

Makes sense.

Squirrels eat them. We should too.

But if you bite into one, you'd be in for a surprise.

Bitter as fuck.

To make acorns edible, you have to leach out the tannins that make them so bitter. And that is exactly what our ancestors did.

You shell them.

You grind them.

You soak and wash them, again and again.

Then you turn them into something edible.

A lot of work for a horrible tasting nut.

So most cultures stopped eating them once better, more reliable food came along.

Meet Dotori-muk Muchim (도토리묵 무침), acorn jelly salad. Today, Korea is one of only a handful of cultures that still eat acorns, perhaps the only one where acorns remain a recognizable everyday food.

Acorn turned into jelly.

A savory dressing of soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds, fresh garlic, and just a touch of fish sauce.

Tossed with onions, green onions, cucumbers, and fragrant seasonal herbs..

Nutty. Salty. Umami. Crunchy and soft. A slight, every so slight bitterness.

Delicious.

- ה -

Drastically different seas on three sides

As a peninsula, Korea is obviously surrounded by the ocean, east, west and south. What makes Korea's oceans so distinct is how different they are from each other. Few peninsulas of Korea’s size are bordered by three marine environments this different from one another. Italy, much larger, is the only one that comes to mind.

What makes them different are the ocean currents and the topography (apparently the correct word is bathymetry) under the sea.

Cold waters flow from the north.

Warm waters flow from the south.

And they collide. Creating some of the richest fishing grounds in the world.

---

To the east is the East Sea (동해 東海), generally written as the Sea of Japan in large font, and East Sea in a smaller font, on most international maps.

This naming issue is pretty contentious. In the early 1900s, Japan got to make the map that the Western world copied. And then they took away Korea's ability to engage in autonomous diplomacy in 1905, followed by full annexation in 1910. Korea didn't have a chance to argue their point of view. So the name stuck. It's only recently that the East Sea got a place in some maps, but even then in smaller font.

But it's not just the East Sea.

Dubu 두부 is Tofu.

Doenjang 된장 is Miso (or "Korean" Miso).

Hwe 회 is Sashimi.

Even Dokdo 독도 is Takeshima, or the even stupider-sounding Liancourt Rocks.

the list goes on and on.

But I digress.

The East Sea is deep. Really deep.

Average depth: ~1,670 m

Deepest point: ~3,740 m

Unlike Korea's west coast, where you can travel far offshore and still be over shallow continental shelf, the seabed off the east coast drops rapidly into deep basins. Only about a quarter of the East Sea is continental shelf shallower than 200 m.

Its surface temperature changes enormously with season and latitude:

winter: roughly 7–15°C

summer: roughly 18–26°C

But underneath sits extraordinarily cold deep water, around 0–1°C in much of the basin.

And two very different water systems meet here.

Warm water enters from the south through the Korea Strait as the Tsushima Warm Current. One branch runs north along Korea as the East Korea Warm Current.

Cold water comes south from the northern East Sea as the North Korea Cold Current.

Where warm and cold water meet, you get biologically productive fishing grounds.

Traditional/commercial catches include:

squid, pollock, saury, herring, flounder, mackerel, sardine, anchovy, snow/red crab. Squid in particular became almost synonymous with Korea's east coast fisheries.

The east coast itself is comparatively straight, steep and exposed, with a narrow continental shelf and relatively few huge tidal flats or sheltered island mazes.

So if the West Sea is a giant muddy bathtub, the East Sea is basically a cliff with an ocean attached to it.

And it’s shockingly beautiful.

Massive mountains rising behind you.

Deep blue water stretching out in front.

This is the Alaska Pollack (Gadus chalcogrammus), Myungtae 명태 in Korean. It is a very popular cold-water fish found in the East Sea. Korean's love this guy so much we have 11 different names for it, perhaps more.

Myungtae 명태 as the fish itself.

Saengtae 생태 when fresh.

Dongtae 동태 when frozen.

Bugeo 북어 when fully dried.

Kodari 코다리 when half-dried.

Hwangtae 황태 if dried under specific conditions in Gangwon Province.

Meoktae 먹태 when the drying goes wrong during an unsually warm winter.

Baektae 백태 when when the winter is too cold.

Nogari 노가리 when young.

Myeongran 명란 for its roe. Japanese call it mentaiko.

Changnan 창난 for its intestines.

The last two are interesting. They are part of a family of side dishes 반찬 called Jeotgal 젓갈.

Cleaned, salted, and fermented.

They are a staple of every Korean meal.

Very salty and intensely umami.

Just a little bit for a large bowl of rice.

Foods like this are what Koreans call Bab-doduk 밥도둑:

“Rice thieves.”

The sea provides.

The mountains block easy movement and trade.

Drying, salting, and fermenting makes them portable across long distances and time.

And each different name produces dozens of different dishes.

---

To the west is the West Sea (서해 西海, Yellow Sea), known internationally as the Yellow Sea (黄海). Beyond it to the nortwesth lies the Bohai Sea (渤海, to the north of Shandong, south of Liaoning, and west of the Liaodong Peninsula.

The West Sea is almost the exact opposite.

Average depth: only ~44 m.

Essentially the entire Yellow Sea is continental shelf. During Ice Age low sea levels, huge portions of what is now ocean were dry land.

Surface temperatures have a huge seasonal swing:

winter: roughly 4–10°C

summer: roughly 19–25°C

Farther north, winter water can become colder still. In summer, however, the surface heats while an old reservoir of cold water survives near the bottom as the Yellow Sea Cold Water Mass.

And then there are the tides.

The Yellow Sea is a macro-tidal sea, with coastal tidal amplitudes approaching 10m in some areas. Water retreats for kilometers in places, exposing enormous mudflats.

That gives western Korea:

mudflats, tidal channels, estuaries, islands, shellfish beds and shallow spawning grounds.

The water is often murkier than the East Sea because rivers, tidal action and the shallow seabed continually move enormous amounts of sediment.

Currents are complicated because tides dominate local movement, but warmer water also penetrates northward as the Yellow Sea Warm Current, while coastal currents and monsoon winds reverse or modify circulation seasonally.

The Yellow Sea is extremely productive. Important catches include:

small yellow croaker, hairtail, pomfret, anchovy, flounder, blue crab, shrimp, squid, plus enormous shellfish and laver resources along the coast.

For prehistoric people this sea must have been ridiculous.

At low tide, the ocean basically lays dinner on the ground for you:

clams, oysters, crabs, snails, seaweed, stranded fish and tidal pools.

You don't even necessarily need a boat.

Due to its proximity to China, the west coast was the main corridor of maritime exchange.

While it is impossible to know the exact sea routes people took, we do have significant evidence around the different ports that connected to each other, the currents, and the seasonal winds.

~2000 BCE onward (Red and Grey). The oldest routes followed the coast. Shandong connected across the Bohai islands to Liaodong, then around the Liaodong Peninsula and down the western Korean coast. Farther south, another old maritime corridor connected southern Korea with northern Kyushu through Tsushima and Iki.

~600 - ~400 BCE (Green). Sailors increasingly began crossing the Yellow Sea rather than going around it. Direct routes eventually connected Shandong with the Daedong River, Han River and Geum River systems.

~200 CE - ~900 CE (Purple). Southern routes increasingly connected Korea directly with southern China. Baekje's first recorded embassy to Eastern Jin was in 372 CE, and Baekje subsequently maintained extensive relations with the Southern Dynasties. These southern routes also connected into the older maritime network running through southern Korea to Japan.

By ~600 CE, The Sea of Japan became another major international maritime space. Japanese records describe Mishihase 粛慎 seafarers at Sado in 544 and a force of more than twenty ships in the northern Japan conflicts of 660. Balhae began sending embassies across the Sea of Japan in 727. In 828, Jang Bogo established Cheonghaejin at Wando with 10,000 men, suppressed piracy and built a commercial network connecting Silla, Tang China and Japan.

The Small Yellow Corvina/Croaker 참조기 (Larimichthys polyactis).

Like the myungtae we have many names for this fish. But what makes them special is the ridiculous price some versions go for.

For example a domestic Yellow Corvina, caught near the Island of Chujado (추자도), dried in the port of Beopseongpo (법성포) can go for as much as $3,000 for a set of ten, each one slightly bigger than my hand.

Artisans use a painstaking, labor-intensive dry salting method called seopgan using 5 year aged sea salt to pack the gills and rub the body of every single fish.
They are dried in the port of Beopseongpo, where the northwest monsoon winds, combine with the exact local humidity and sunlight levels to dry the fish slowly from the inside out.
Then buried inside earthern jars filled with unhulled barley for an additional 3 to 6 months. The barley naturally regulates humidity, acts as an organic pesticide, and absorbs the rancid surface oils, replacing them with a nutty, earthy flavor profile.

Worth it?

I've had one in my entire life. But to me, it's just good fish.

---

To the south lies the South Sea (남해 南海) that separates the Korean Peninsula with the Japanese Archipelago. Since it basically connects the West Sea (Yellow Sea) and the East Sea (Sea of Japan), no real arguments about naming here. That gap between Korea and Japan, is known as the Korea Strait.

The South Sea is harder to give a single average depth because “South Sea” is a Korean geographic term, not one neatly bounded international ocean basin.

It includes Korea's southern coastal waters, the approaches to Jeju, and the Korea Strait between Korea and Japan.

The Korea Strait itself is roughly:

160 km wide and around 100 m deep, with Tsushima Island splitting it into eastern and western channels.

Surface water is the warmest of Korea's three coastal zones:

winter: roughly 9–16°C

summer: roughly 23–27°C

Its defining feature is the Tsushima Warm Current.

Warm, relatively saline water originating ultimately with the Kuroshio comes north from the East China Sea, passes through the Korea Strait and enters the East Sea. Average transport through the strait is about 2.5 million cubic metres of water every second.

That makes the South Sea a biological crossroads between warm subtropical waters and temperate Korea.

Unlike the straight east coast, the southern coastline is shattered into:

bays, coves, peninsulas and thousands of islands.

It is shallow, protected in many places, warm and nutrient-rich: basically perfect territory for fishing, shellfish collecting and eventually aquaculture.

Major catches include:

anchovy, mackerel, jack mackerel, hairtail, sardine and Spanish mackerel.

The sheltered coast is particularly famous for:

oysters, ark shell/cockles, mussels, abalone, laver (김), sea mustard (미역) and other seaweeds.

While Jeotgal are made throughout Korea, the South Sea is where they have perfected it to an art form. If it lives in the water and is edible, it becomes Jeotgal. There are apparently over 150 kinds of Jeotgal in Korea.

From tiny shrimp Jeotgal 새우젓 used to season food,

to sliced baby squid Jeotgal 꼴뚜기젓,

to raw marinated crab 게장 sold at restaurants that require at least three months on a reservation list.

The sea is abundant.

The mountains make it tortuous to travel.

Preserve it in anyway possible.

Absolutely delicious.

So from the three Seas, you almost get three completely different food landscapes:

East Sea: deep cold/warm-current ocean

→ squid, pelagic fish, cold-water fish, deep-water species

West Sea: huge shallow tidal shelf

→ croaker, crab, shrimp, shellfish, mudflat food

South Sea: warm island-filled straits and bays

→ anchovy, mackerel, shellfish, seaweed, aquaculture paradise

- ה -

Precious soil

As we've found out soil is precious in Korea. 75% of it are mountains. Very little is suitable for farming or living. There is the huge Songnen Plain to the north, but Korea hasn't held territory there since Balhae collapsed to Khitan Liao in 926 CE.

But there's an important catch.

Not everything grows everywhere. You can't just plant rice because it yields higher calories per m², or millet because you like how it tastes. Climate and soil dictate this. And your life depends on what grows there. And because arable land is so precious, it defined where people could stay.

The primary crops:

Broomcorn millet (기장):

Handles cold/dry conditions exceptionally well. Very short season, commonly 60–90 days. Can grow at higher latitudes and elevations than most other grains. Needs relatively little water and can produce something even on poor, thin, sandy, or low-fertility soil. Does badly in waterlogged ground. Relatively easy crop: sow, weed while young, then cut the loose seed heads and thresh. Excellent famine-security crop because it can be planted late and still mature.

core: 38–45°N / upper limit: ~48°N+
prehistoric yield: 500–650 kg/ha
kcal / m²: 190–285 kcal
planted: May–June
harvested: Aug–Sept

Foxtail millet (조):

Likes somewhat warmer and wetter conditions than broomcorn and rewards better soil with higher production. Best around roughly 16–26°C during growth, but highly drought tolerant. Grows on anything from sandy soil to heavy clay as long as it drains; dislikes waterlogging and salty soil. Usually matures in under 90 days. Still relatively easy dry-field farming, but wants more dependable summer moisture than broomcorn. Its dense seed head makes harvesting straightforward: cut the heads/stalks, dry them, then thresh out the very small grain.

core: 34–42°N / upper limit: ~44–45°N
prehistoric yield: ~500–900 kg/ha
kcal / m²: ~175–230 kcal/m²
planted: May–June
harvested: Sept–Oct

Wet-Rice (벼):

<wet rice paddies found near the Songgukri neolithic/bronze archaeological site>

Warm-season crop that wants abundant water and a long frost-free growing period. Best suited to flat lowlands with soils that hold water, especially clay and clay-loam. The plant itself is only half the technology: productive paddy farming requires leveling land, building bunds, controlling inflow and drainage, maintaining channels, preparing saturated soil, and often raising seedlings separately before transplanting. Extremely labor-intensive compared with millet, especially during field preparation and transplanting, but once the infrastructure exists the same land can be cultivated repeatedly with little or no fallow. Flooding also suppresses many competing weeds. Harvest itself is straightforward sickle work followed by drying and threshing; building and maintaining the paddy is the expensive part.

core: 30–36°N / upper limit: ~37–39°N
prehistoric yield: 600–1,000 kg/ha
kcal / m²: ~215–360 kcal
planted: April–May sowing / May–June field planting
harvested: Sept–Oct

Supplementary crops:

Soybean (콩):

<dry-field farming found near the Songgukri neolithic/bronze archaeological site>

Warm-season dry-field crop. Likes warm soil, moderate rainfall, and well-drained loam or silt-loam; prolonged flooding damages roots badly. More demanding of moisture than millet, particularly while flowering and filling beans, but does not require highly fertile nitrogen-rich soil because bacteria living on its roots fix atmospheric nitrogen. That makes soy valuable not merely as food but as part of a mixed cropping system. Fairly easy to grow once established. Harvest when the plant and pods dry; beat or thresh the pods to release the beans. Waiting too long risks pods splitting and dropping seed.

core: 34–42°N / upper limit: ~44–45°N
prehistoric yield: ~500–1,000 kg/ha
kcal / m²: ~225–450 kcal
planted: May–June
harvested: Sept–Oct

Adzuki bean (팥):
Warm-season dry-field legume broadly similar to soybean but slower to establish in cold soil. Likes reasonably fertile, well-drained ground and does poorly if its roots stay wet. Like soybean, it can fix nitrogen. Takes roughly 100–120 days and therefore needs a longer reliable warm season than the millets. The annoying part is harvest: pods can mature unevenly and shatter very easily, dumping the beans onto the ground if harvest is delayed. So compared with millet, adzuki beans asks for more attention at exactly the right moment.

core: 32–40°N / upper limit: ~42°N
prehistoric yield: ~500–1,000 kg/ha
kcal / m²: ~165–330 kcal
planted: June–July
harvested: Oct

Secondary crops:

Barley (보리):

Cool-season grain. Handles cold, drought, high elevation, and relatively poor conditions better than wheat, and some forms mature extremely quickly. Likes well-drained loam or light clay but strongly dislikes waterlogging. It can grow farther north, higher, and in drier country than wheat. Its great Korean advantage is timing: plant after the autumn harvest, let it overwinter, then harvest in late spring before rice demands the field. Relatively low-maintenance while growing; harvest by cutting the dry heads and threshing. Short growing season makes it the natural partner for rice double-cropping.

core: 34–42°N / upper limit: ~44–46°N
prehistoric yield: 500–1,500 kg/ha
kcal / m²: 175–530 kcal
planted: Oct–Nov
harvested: May–early June next year

Wheat (밀):

Cool-season grain that prefers cool growth followed by warm, dry weather as the grain ripens. Best on fertile, well-drained silt or clay-loam soils; dislikes prolonged waterlogging. Generally wants better soil and a somewhat longer season than barley. Autumn planting lets it exploit land when summer crops are finished, but Korean timing is awkward: wheat can still be ripening as early-summer rains arrive. Wet grain can sprout or deteriorate before harvest, and a late harvest delays preparation of rice paddies. Harvest is otherwise familiar cereal work: cut, dry, thresh, winnow.

core: 34–40°N / upper limit: ~42–44°N
prehistoric yield: 500–1,500 kg/ha
kcal / m²: 170–510 kcal
planted: Oct–Nov
harvested: May–June next year

Broomcorn millet: I will grow almost anywhere. Just leave me enough summer.

Foxtail millet: Give me decent dry land and rain and I'll feed more people.

Wet rice: Build me an entire fucking landscape and I will reward you with population density.

Soybeans: Give me drained land; I'll give you protein and help replenish nitrogen.

Adzuki beans: Same idea, but don't screw up my harvest.

Barley: Give me the cold half of the year.

Wheat: Give me the cold half too, but I may still be here when you want to plant rice.

So if you are a farmer living on the Korean Peninsula,

and assuming you have all the seeds and the technology, which is probably not true for everyone, especially wet-rice technology,

where you live, and the soil you have access to, defines everything about your life.

Above a certain latitude or elevation: you can't reliably plant wet rice.
But even where rice grows, not every piece of land can become a paddy. Hillsides, dry ground, thin soil, and poorly watered land remain millet country.

Naturally, the calories provided by each crop, and the limited amount of land you have limit how large your village can be.

This is Doenjang 된장. Along with Kimchi, the quintessential foundation of Korean cuisine. Salty, nutty, intensely umami. It is made by fermenting soy beans. It is the mother sauce for all Korean meals.

It starts with quality soybeans.

They are soaked/cooked and mashed, then formed into large blocks called Meju 메주.

Those blocks are tied with rice straw and left to ferment for weeks to months, traditionally while hanging in a warm, ventilated place. Naturally occuring molds and bacteria colonize the Meju.

Then the fermented Meju blocks go into a large earthenware jar with strong salt brine. Traditionally, charcoal, dried chili peppers, or jujubes may be added to the jar, partly for custom and partly because people believed they helped protect the fermentation.

After several weeks to a few months, you separate the contents.

The liquid becomes Ganjang 간장, traditional Korean soy sauce.

The softened fermented soybean solids are mashed, salted if necessary, and packed back into a jar.

Those solids then ferment and mature for additional months, sometimes years.

That becomes Doenjang 된장.

Mix red pepper powder, cooked grain or grain syrup, meju powder, and salt. Ferment it in an earthen jar, and you get Gochujang 고추장, the characteristic sauce that seems to color every Korean dish red.

<Doenjang, Gochujang, Ganjang>

The soybeans themselves? Soak them, grind them with water, strain and cook the resulting soy milk, then coagulate and press the curds. Tofu, or Dubu in Korean.

- ה -

You are what you eat

Whether you plant millet or wet rice, Spring is always going to be an issue. The crops you harvested last year would be getting dangerously low, and unless you had a different food source, you would be in deep trouble.

That helps explain why Korea developed such a deep relationship with fermentation and preservation techniques. Along with a diet that consists of an extremely wide variety of foraged vegetables.

This is a very typical Korean meal, and yes, this is how we normally eat.

Looks like a lot.

Looks chaotic.

But there's a general order to this.

The foundation is rice. We each get a bowl. Semi-sticky, short-grained rice. Steamed.
To the right is a soup. This time it's miyeok-guk, or seaweed soup.
In the middle is a Jjigae, or a stew. Kimchi Jjigae. Sometimes it's either/or for stew and soup. But there's always some sort of broth dish at every meal.
Then we have the main proteins.

A grilled mackerel,
Jeyuk bokkeum (stir-fried pork),
and an omelette thrown in (I think for the kids).

The soy sauce is there for the fish.
One or two types of kimchi are always present. This time just one, the classic baechu kimchi.
Everything else are banchan, or side dishes. They change every meal.

This is a slightly more extreme version. It's called a 50 cheop 첩 meal, cheop means dishes. Same structure just more dishes. I guess in the photo above, they haven't brought out the rice or the utensils. You'd be surprised to know that this meal is still pretty standard. You can find these restaurants everywhere.

This is called a Sura-sang 수라상. It's a recreation of what a Joseon King might have eaten on a normal day. Not banquet food. You'd be surprised to see how similar it is to what normal people ate. Just fancier utensils, bronze bowls, and rarer ingredients.

Rice as the foundation.
Soup to the right.
A stew on a separate table (not shown)
Two or three proteins.
Three types of kimchi.
A bunch of seasonal banchan.
Some sauces.

Mostly vegetables.

Some rice.

Meat and fish, always.

- ה -

Tiger or bunny?

This is one of the stupidest arguments in human history. It has to do with the shape of the Korean Peninsula.

Look at it yourself and tell me what it looks like.

The story starts around 1902–1903, when Japanese geographers began comparing the Korean Peninsula to a rabbit. The name most closely associated with it is geologist Kotō Bunjirō, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University who had conducted geological surveys in Korea. In a 1903 publication he described Korea's outline as resembling a rabbit. Another Japanese geography text from 1902 also presented the rabbit comparison.

And this wasn't happening in an innocent political environment.

Japan had defeated China in 1895, defeated Russia in 1905, imposed the protectorate over Korea that same year, and was moving toward annexation in 1910. Japanese geographical writing increasingly discussed Korea not merely as a place but as a peninsula whose location supposedly explained its historical vulnerability and dependence. Korean intellectuals therefore interpreted the rabbit comparison as part of a broader depiction of Korea as small, timid, passive and requiring protection. Scholars today disagree over how deliberately insulting the original rabbit analogy itself was, but there is little ambiguity about how Koreans received it.

Then an 18-year-old kid decided this was bullshit.

Choe Nam-seon 최남선 founded the magazine Sonyeon (소년, “Youth”) in 1908. In its first issue he took on the rabbit.

His response was essentially:

That's not a rabbit.

That's a fucking tiger.

More precisely, Choe described the peninsula as a tiger raising its paw and clawing toward the Asian continent, an energetic animal seemingly running or leaping forward. He argued that the tiger actually fitted Korea's borders better than the rabbit did. More importantly, he said it represented an assertive, expanding, youthful Korea.

By the late twentieth century, Koreans weren't merely saying that Choe had answered the Japanese rabbit with a tiger.

A much better story circulated:

Koreans had always regarded their country as a tiger. The Japanese deliberately changed it into a rabbit to humiliate Koreans and destroy their national spirit.

And then there was a problem.

Researchers who went looking for this older tiger tradition couldn't find it.

A major modern study concludes that there are no known premodern written references describing the Korean Peninsula as tiger-shaped. The peninsula-as-tiger idea, as far as the surviving evidence shows, was Choe's early twentieth-century invention.

Before everybody started arguing about rabbits and tigers, Joseon Koreans apparently had another comparison.

They sometimes imagined the country as a standing human figure.

My personal favorite:

- ה -

Finding Korean DNA through Soil

Soil has now shown us the populations surrounding Korea, and the routes by which they could reach it.

But that leaves us two nagging questions:

1. On the Y-DNA side,

Where the fuck is O?

and,

2. On the mtDNA side,

Where are M7, F, and A?

To answer this question, let's move the map forward to around 500 BCE.

In 500 BCE, still not enough DNA in Korea, but a lot of the missing DNA appears everywhere else.

On the Y-DNA side, O2 now shows up clearly in ancient DNA from northern China and Liaoning.
On the mtDNA side, F and A show up in northern China and the Mongol steppes.

Now the two conspicuous pieces we still haven't accounted for are the lineages that become unusually important in Korea and Japan:

Y-DNA: O1b2-M176

mtDNA: M7

Let's hunt them down.

But O1b2 and M7 are much older than 500 BCE. To find them, we have to rewind much further.

O1b2-M176 is fascinating:

~45,000 BCE, O-M175 appears in China / southern East Asia

↓

~32,000 BCE, China, O splits into O1 + O2

↓

~31,000 BCE, China, O1 splits into O1a + O1b

↓

~29,000 BCE, China, O1b splits into O1b1 + O1b2-M176

↓

O1b2-M176 remains a small lineage for ~23,000 years

↓

~5750 BCE, major demographic expansion

↓

O1b2-M176 becomes extraordinarily concentrated in the Korean Peninsula

↓

~1000 BCE onward crosses into Japan with continental/Yayoi populations

↓

modern Korea: O1b2-M176 = 31.42%

And we can track them on our map, through place and time:

This also leaves a tantalizing hint as to who the Proto-Japonic speakers were: whatever population those O1b2-M176 carriers were traveling with.

Their descendants begin expanding around 5,750 BCE, become heavily concentrated in the Korean Peninsula, and begin appearing in Japan around 1,000 BCE.

Obviously, a Y-chromosome cannot speak.

But people do.

And if Proto-Japonic spread into Japan from the Korean Peninsula, then O1b2-M176 may be one of the clearest paternal traces of the people who carried it.

About ~1500-800 BCE, at the dawn of the Bronze Age, some of the descendants of this expanding population may have been among the people archaeologists call:

Mumun Culture

Let's go find the mother's (mtDNA) missing gene: M7.

Compared to O-M175, the M branch is more ancient, and considerably simpler. And it's everywhere.

~58,000 BCE, M appears in Southern Asia

↓

one branch moves into eastern Asia

↓

~48,000 BCE, M7 appears in southern/coastal East Asia

↓

then it fragments geographically:

→ ~29,000 BCE, M7a in northeast/east toward Korea–Japan

→ ~31,000 BCE, M7b in continental China

→ ~27,000 BCE, M7c in southern/eastern China and Southeast Asia

Today in modern Japan:

M7a: ~7.5%
M7b: ~5%
M7c: ~0.8%

Where M7a is much higher among Ryukyu/Okinawans,

and much smaller among the Ainu.

In Korea:

M7a: ~3.8%
M7b: ~2.7%
M7c: ~3.8%

Same M7 ancestry, but a very different mixture of its surviving branches.

And looking at the paternal and maternal stories side by side, an uncomfortable pattern keeps appearing.

It's hard to draw that conclusion without direct proof, but the more I look at DNA, the more it looks like:

men killing men, but leaving the women to live

Morbid. But that's the pattern I see.

And we humans are very good at denying male reproduction. We have whole systems devoted to it. Let me introduce a few:

1. Kill the men. Take the women.

This one requires very little imagination.

Defeat another group.

Kill the men who can fight you.

Kill their sons before they grow up and avenge them.

Take the women.

It appears in ancient texts from all over the world because it was hardly an exotic idea.

And archaeology occasionally catches something very close to it.

At the Neolithic massacre site of Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Germany, archaeologists found men, children and older women murdered and dumped into a pit.

One demographic group was strangely absent:

young adult women.

Maybe they escaped.

Maybe they weren't there.

Or maybe they were the part of the defeated community worth keeping alive.

We don't know.

But we don't have to invent the basic behavior. Humans have documented themselves doing it repeatedly.

And genetically the result is brutally simple:

the women survive into the next population.

the men don't.

2. Kill the clan.

Something very strange happens around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago.

Male genetic diversity collapses across large parts of Eurasia.

Female diversity does not.

This is usually called the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck.

At one point the effective number of reproducing male lineages appears to have fallen to a tiny fraction of the female number.

That does not mean somebody murdered 90% of the world's men.

But one of the strongest explanations is considerably more interesting.

Humans had become farmers.

They had land.

Property.

Livestock.

Inheritance.

And increasingly:

patrilineal clans.

Men living beside fathers, brothers, sons and paternal cousins.

Women moving between those groups.

Now imagine two such clans fight.

You aren't killing random men anymore.

You are killing men who carry the same Y chromosome.

Destroy one clan and an entire branch of the paternal tree disappears.

Take its women and their maternal lineages survive perfectly well inside the victorious clan.

Repeat that process for centuries.

Suddenly the genetic pattern isn't particularly mysterious.

3. Replace the men.

We have ancient DNA showing that something very much like this could actually happen.

Around 2500 BCE, Steppe-related populations entered Iberia.

They did not replace everybody.

Far from it.

Most of the ancestry of the resulting population remained local.

But within a few centuries, the old Iberian Y chromosomes were almost completely replaced by incoming paternal lineages.

Read that again.

The population survived.

The paternal lines didn't.

We don't know whether that happened through massacre, conquest, status, marriage, polygyny, or some particularly unpleasant combination of all four.

<Halberstadt-Sonntagsfeld mass grave site>

DNA can't tell us what happened in the bedroom.

But it can tell us something happened to the fathers.

4. Hoard the women.

You don't even have to kill anybody.

Just make reproduction extremely unequal.

A woman can have only so many children.

A powerful man can father hundreds.

Give one man:

land,
wealth,
horses,
slaves,
wives,
concubines,
political power,

and give twenty other men nothing.

Twenty-one men remain alive.

But genetically, only one of them matters.

The famous example is the enormous Y-chromosome lineage spread across the former Mongol world, sometimes popularly called the “Chinggis Khan chromosome.”

Whether it actually originated with Genghis Khan himself is uncertain.

The phenomenon isn't.

Some extraordinarily successful paternal lineage exploded across Eurasia around the time of the Mongol expansions.

One man's descendants acquiring power meant that his sons acquired women.

Then their sons acquired women.

Power became reproductive success.

5. Make them untouchable.

This may be one of the most effective mechanisms humans ever invented.

You don't kill the defeated population.

You don't even have to enslave them.

You simply decide:

their men are not suitable husbands.

Wrong caste.

Wrong clan.

Wrong ethnicity.

Wrong religion.

Wrong occupation.

Wrong class.

Wrong village.

Wrong blood.

Then enforce it socially.

No respectable family gives them daughters.

No land.

No inheritance.

No legitimate marriage.

No recognized children.

Sometimes the boundary is formal law.

More often it is something even stronger:

everyone around you agrees that marrying one of them would disgrace your family.

That can last for centuries.

And this is where social hierarchy becomes genetic hierarchy.

If women from the subordinate group can be taken, married upward, enslaved, concubined, or otherwise absorbed into the dominant population while men from that same group are excluded from dominant women, you get exactly the pattern we've been looking at:

female ancestry crosses the boundary.

male ancestry doesn't.

You don't need genocide.

You need a marriage market.

And humans have been brutally good at regulating marriage markets.

Caste systems are the obvious extreme. But almost every society has produced softer versions:

aristocrat/commoner,

free/slave,

conqueror/conquered,

settler/native,

landowner/tenant,

citizen/foreigner,

“respectable” family/outcast family.

The biological result can be enormous even when nobody dies.

A man can live seventy years.

Work.

Eat.

Laugh.

Have friends.

Grow old.

And still leave nothing in the paternal gene pool because society decided nobody would marry him.

That is much colder than killing him.

And in some ways much more efficient.

6. Cut the line. Literally.

And when humans really wanted a man alive but harmless, we invented another solution.

Castration.

Chinese imperial courts.

Byzantium.

The Islamic world.

The Ottoman court.

Enslaved boys and prisoners turned into eunuchs precisely because they could serve powerful households without producing rival hereditary families.

You could trust a man with enormous political power because one thing was guaranteed:

his dynasty ended with him.

Different method.

Same result.

A living man whose Y chromosome goes nowhere.

Perhaps “men killing men, but leaving the women to live” is too simple.

Humans discovered something much more efficient.

You have a veritable smorgasbord of options:

kill them

kill their sons

take their women

enslave them

castrate them

outcaste them

deny them land

deny them marriage

make them socially untouchable

monopolize wives

turn status into fertility

erase their clan

absorb their daughters

let the maternal line continue

let the paternal line vanish

Or simply make sure their sons never have sons.

Different method.

Same genetic result.

The mothers remain.

The fathers disappear.

- ה -

Now that we've returned from our morbid detour, let's step back from the individual genes, and return to the larger story Soil tells:

From hunter-gatherers that roamed long and wide.
To Jeulmun communities increasingly settling along productive coasts and rivers.
To semi-sedentary farmers sowing foxtail and broomcorn millet.
To sedentary farmers harvesting massive amounts of rice in paddies.

Feet planted firmly in soil.

Gradually these People became:

Koreans.

- ה -

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