From: robohen@ocf.berkeley.edu (Henry Robertson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Re: Hus Fu and the Japanese
Date: 25 Dec 1992 03:07:40 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
NNTP-Posting-Host: tsunami.berkeley.edu

In article <42854@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> mcovingt@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Maiko Covington) writes:
>Rikiya Asano says about the Ainu:
>>It is commonsense that these people are not Caucasians just because
>>their skin color is lighter. That's because of the weather! And, maybe
>>inter-racial relationship with the Russians has something to do with
>>this also.
>
>Hmmm... Does anyone really know what their race relation is? They
>are light skinned.. but is this really a climatic thing? How about
>all the Inuit, they live up in really cold areas but they are
>definitely not pale. Same with a lot of the people living in the
>northeast of what was the Soviet Union (Siberia area, etc). A lot of
>them look 'asian'. Does anyone know when the Ainu migrated to Japan?
>Just curious...
>
The Ainu language is currently thought to be a distant branch of Finno-
Ugric languages.  Until several hundred years ago, there existed a belt
spanning the arctic latitudes of a lifestyle of reindeer herding, like the
Lapp herdsmen remaining in Finland today.  Further to the South, it was 
Mongolian-style grazing of other animals such as sheep, cows, and horses.
This economic lifestyle spanned from Bulgaria through Central Asia to
Korea.  As for Japan, the change in terrain from continental climes induced
an adaptation, for Altaic-language speaking mid-latitude nomads, or 
Finno-Ugric-speaking-high-latitude-nomads.  As for skin color, it has a 
correlation with the amount of light, which is affected but not dependent
on latitude.  Inuits have darker coloration, because they live surrounded
by snow & ice, which reflect a lot of UV rays.  By comparison, Europeans
on the same latitude on the other side of the globe live in terrain with plenty
of darkly colored vegetation, hence the lack of necessity for protective  
coloration.  Japan being an island with plenty of rainfall, nomadic herding
became unnecessary, and hence the shift to hunter-gatherer economics.
Then rice cultivation came from China.  I have read conflicting accounts
as to whether rice cultivation originated in China or Southeast Asia.  
Obviously, it is possible for more than one person to invent the same thing,
and archeological digs are always prone to political and economic conditions.
Hence, to get back to the question of the origins of Ainu, I'm sure plenty
of interesting digs could be done on Sakhalin & Southeast Siberia, but
political conditions are such that not a lot of Japanese archeologists have
done so so far.  Since communist China is opening up, more research will be
done in the next decade as to how much the Peking Man has evolved independently.Current scientific mythology holds that man one day jumped off the tree in
South Africa and started walking on two feet.  Then he steadily spread
Northward at the rate of 10 miles/year.  A branch of Neanderthals briefly
set up an unsuccessful enterprise in Europe, but was completely exterminated
by Homo 
Sapiens on an organized campaign of genocide.  The he spread east, eventually
spreading to the rest of the world, while everyone evolved at exactly
the same pace towards becoming modern man.  Well, actually, until 1960 or
so, we though that the White man's evolution was the most complete, but
these days allowing for political sensitivities, we say that everbody evolved
exactly at the same pace.  

I say, there was a lot of independent evolution going on, with intermingling
to make up for it.  Current DNA-theory fashion tells us that we can trace
all of mankind to an Adam & Eve by adding up all the dominant genes, but
I prefer to believe that there were many different communities of monkeys
that shared genes to a lesser or greater extent.  Sometimes, a positive
mutation would seriously upset the population balance, but even the losers
will still survive to some extent.  Must we assume that monkeys had pure
dominant genes?  Just because Africans have dark skin does not mean that 
all their other genes are more dominant.  Right now, we believe pure chance
changes genes, but I prefer to believe there are other mechanisms, still
unexplored, that can also cause change.  In a word, anthropology is steadily
evolving from one-dimensional "unilineal evolution" theory, to a much more
complicated fractal-dimension field.








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