Quote:
Originally Posted by Shinji01
I had a teacher in high school that was obsessed about the Ainu.
Its a pity I didnt pay attention in class though.
As mentioned, they are more Tibetan/Russian as opposed to the Okinawan being more South East Asian. (Okinawan language/ dialect is totally different to standard Japanese and use words like Chanpurū which is very close to the Malay or Indonesian word campur.)
However, it is difficult to say who are the indigenous people because HOkkaido has the Ainu, Honshu Islands are mostly Yamato who are said to be of Korean roots, and the Okinawan who are South East Asian/ Spanish roots.
Ainu and Okinawan tend to be considered indigenous because they are the minority.
Ainu - the guy on the left is Ainu, the left is Russian(Tolstoy)
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The reason I use the term indigenous is that the Ainu represent an earlier migration out of Africa into eastern Asia. While they look more caucasian, almost Russian in some of those early photos, like you mentioned they are closely related to isolated Tibetan tribes and even have interestingly similar markers to Andaman islanders. The Andaman islands are one of the few places untouched by civilization today, and the people living there are descendents of one of the earliest waves out of Africa. The genetic marker similarities present the interesting case that the Ainu, Tibetan, and Andaman islanders may all be descended from these original migrants who took different paths out of Africa. Their skin and hair is phenotypic and could have evolved via convergent evolution similarly to Russian populations without being closely related.
Further, the paleolithic inhabitants of Japan were something more like the Ainu, and gradually were assimilated (meaning, they still do contribute to modern Japanese genetic heritage) by the later waves of migrants out of the continent during the Yayoi period. Some of these Jomon-era hunter gatherers lived in the far north, however, and preserved their culture without being assimilated, perhaps due to the difficulty in maintaining the agricultural society the Yayoi had imported in the colder climate. These people became the Ainu.