Do Koreans even exist? part 3. Soil

3. Soil

Until now we've talked about Blood (DNA), and Words (Language). It's time to bring in the final tools at our disposal: Soil (climate, geography, territory, and land), Stuff (artifacts) and Books (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%).

• mtDNA (maternal):
  D (32.4%), B (14.6%), M7(10.3%), G (10.3%), F (9.7%), A (8.1%), Other (~14.6%).

• 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 West Liao River/Liaoning 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.

• Around 1000–300 BCE, Japonic crossed the strait into Japan, with populations moving from the Korean Peninsula during the transition to Yayoi agriculture. 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?

1. Soil bears us food.

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

3. Soil is 'Us'.

For most of human history, soil was primarily 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 deplete, and in the winter they disapear. So they need to move to where food is.

So 50 people might require:

• Hunting-heavy foragers: ~1,250 km²
• Mixed/gathering-rich foraging: ~260 km²
• Exceptionally rich coast / fisheries: ~50 km²

Humans harvested what the land produced.

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 Liaoning is the Liao River (요하, 遼河) that empties into the Bohai Sea.

Further north is 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. Today, the Amur also marks much of the border between China and Russia.

Moving south toward the Korean Peninsula, we encounter the Yalu River (압록강, 鴨綠江) and the Tumen River (두만강, 豆滿江), which form the border between North Korea, China, and a sliver of Russia.

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 (燕山 / Yanshan) help separate the North China Plain from Liaoning.
• The Greater Khingan Mountains (大興安嶺 / Da Hinggan Ling) divide the Mongol steppe from the river basins of Manchuria.
• The Qian Mountains (千山山脈 / Qianshan), along with the eastern Liaoning highlands, help funnel movement from Liaoning toward the Korean 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 were soil.

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, nor 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.
• Baikal / Eastern Steppe populations could move southeast into Liaoning.

And then something remarkable happened across China.

- ה -

Agriculture

People began making the 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.

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.

And the people growing it were making Jeulmun (빗살무늬) pottery. They were part of what historians call:

Jeulmun Culture

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 form the soil.

They made the soil produce food.

Same 50 people:

Millet agriculture: ~0.5 km²

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 -

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.

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 “Genghis 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.

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 -