Seeking the Yayoi

The conventional pre-history of Japan involves horseback riding soldiers called the Yayoi entering Japan around the area where it comes closest to Korea around sometime in the middle of the first millenium before the current era, where the indigeneous people, who had lived there for 30,000 years, called the Jomon, a fishing oriented pottery making people who were linguistic and ethnic close relatives of the modern Ainu minority of Northern Japan were assimilated into the Yayoi superstrate in a process of ethnogenesis that gave rise to the modern Japanese people.

Until around 1000 CE, the northern Honshū island was inhabited by the Emishi to whom we can be quite definitive in attaching an Ainu ethnicity and language affiliation, and Ainu related people also inhabited the region known as Ezo, consisting of the island of Hokkaidō; and were formerly spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. So, for the first 1300 years, the Yayoi were pretty much confined to Southern Japan.

The Yayoi may have been some manner of Korean people, although which of the ancient Korean kingdoms they (and the modern Korean language) have the strongest affinity to is disputed.

As I noted in a wikipedia article on the origin of the Japanese language that is linked above: "Current estimates are that "wago" (i.e. words attributable to the original Yaoyi language) make up 33.8% of the Japanese lexicon, that "knago" (i.e. words with roots borrowed from Chinese since the 5th century CE) make up 49.1% of Japanese words (and in addition, the Chinese ideograms used in the Japanese written language), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8.8% of Japanese words, and that 8.3% of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages. This account attributes only a small number of words in modern Japanese to Ainu roots." Almost all of the various characters used to write down Japanese are also borrowed from Chinese.

I'd instinctively favor an account that suggests that the Ainu linguistic contribution is undercounted, but because Ainu is a living language that is well attested, as is Chinese, and given that Japanese and Chinese have been a literary language for most of the time period in question, I suspect that an identification of wago words with the original Yayoi language is probably pretty accurate.

There are strongly suggestive indications that the Yayoi language was Altaic, a language family that also has as core members, the Turkic languages, the Mongolian languages, and the Tungusic languages of Manchuria. The geographic scope of the proposed Altaic language family members is considerable as this map from Wikipedia indicates:

But, historically, this spread was quite recent.

The Turkic languages reached Central Asia, Europe and Turkey within the last seventeen hundred years or so. Their ethnogenesis is associated with the arrival of the Bronze Age and horses in the Northeastern Asian region sometime in the vincinity of 1500 BCE to 700 BCE.

The traditional date for the Yayoi arrival in Japan is 2700 years ago, and most evidence to date suggest an actual arrival a few hundred years later. This would be consistent with the Yayoi as a cultural offshoot of the proto-Turkic peoples.

While the empire of Ghengis Khan was the largest on land known to man, in the late middle ages, until a eight or nine hundred years ago, it was confined to Mongolia, Northern China and perhaps Eastern Siberia where it is found today (the only linguistic legacy of its expansion is the Oirat language spoken by peoples on the Caspian plains of Russia. The Mongolians first entire recorded history in the 4th century CE in Manchuria and Mongolia as a nomadic people called the Khitan people.

The Tungusic languages have remains at all times largely confined to Manchuria.

Japanese and Korean are clearly not Tibet-Burmese languages, despite their heavy borrowing from Chinese, and the linguistic case of the an Altaic affiliation for Japanese and Korean (presumably via its Yayoi roots) is not trivial. The Altaic languages, Old Japanese and Korean all have a linguistic feature called vowel harmony that is rarely, if ever, found in other languages. Similarities have also been found in verb conjugation classes, and there has been some success in matching tonal aspects of Japanese to consonants found in other Altaic languages. Vovin has suggested that as many as 15 to 23 core Old Japanese words have Altaic proto-language counterparts, far more than chance would suggest, and almost all of the Altaic-Japanese correspondences are wago words. The Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean are also notable for a lack of noun classes and lack of grammatic gender.

So far, so good. There is a problem, however. While Japanese population genetics do parse rather neatly into East Asian and Jomon components, the East Asian genetic component looks far more like the Chinese than it does like the Altaic populations of Northeastern Eurasia.

It isn't so hard to imagine how this could happen. In the same vein, Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia don't have a very strong genetic link to the Turkish language speaking people of Anatolia. One imagines that an ethnically Chinese population in and around Korea may have been a subject people of a Altaic language speaking elite leading to a language shift in the population (at least among the elites that would go on to conquer Japan as the Yayoi), with little Altaic genetic admiture from the ruling elite to the soldiers who went on to conquer Japan.

This pushes the genetic forebears of the Yayoi to the Southwest, and the linguistic and cultural forebears of the Yayoi to the North, probably North of Korea entirely.

Given that Japanese appears to have more lexical similarity to Proto-Turkic than to other Altaic language family languages, that Proto-Turkic was the first of the Alataic languages to experience an expansion out of Asia, and that Japanese lexical links to Altaic languages appear to be mediated through Proto-Turkic, one imagines the linguistic forebears of the Japanese to be Proto-Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia.

This would have been some time after the 4th millenium before the current era, when the horse appears to have been domesticated (probably reaching the Turks as a cultural transmission from Indo-European language speakers such as the Tocharians or their immediately predecessors in Central Asia), but no later than the 3rd millenium before the current era when the Yayoi arrive in Japan, which is strongly consistent with Proto-Turkic ethnogenesis.

The Proto-Turkic expansion would presumably start a little later than the Indo-European expansions, given the direction of horse domestication transmission and Bronze Age technology transmission across the Russian Steppe, and Finno-Urgic a.k.a. Uralic languages of that region appear to be older still than Indo-European languages. In addition, some of the region, prior to the expansions of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages with the horse would have spoken Paleo-Siberian languages such as Yenesian which has linguistic links to the Na-Dene languages of North America.

READ MORE - Seeking the Yayoi

Twenty Obvious International Trends

Lots of economic, environmental and political predictions are hardly better than horoscopes. Others are reliable enough to be thought of a "fundamentals." I'm more interested in the latter. Here are a few:

1. China's economic growth rate will be greater for medium term time periods (e.g. three years or more) than that of the United States for the foreseeable future, because it is engaged in "catch up growth," while the United States is not.

2. China will experience a notable economic crash in the next decade or so, because it hasn't had one for a long time and periods of even strong sustained growth are almost always interrupted periodically by economic crashes.

3. India's economic growth rate will be greater for medium term time periods than that of the United States for the foreseeable future, because it is engaged in "catch up growth," while the United States is not.

4. India's economic growth rate will exceed that of China sometime in the next ten to fifteen years, because China's per capita GDP is significantly greater than that of India, leaving India with more "catch up growth" potential than China.

5. Oil dependent nations in the Middle East will each experience serious economic contractions not long as oil production in the nation in question starts to fall due to exhaustion of the nation's oil supply. These nations are heavily reliant on oil revenues to sustain their standard of living with imported goods and temporary immigrant workers, both of which will be harder to come by when there are not new oil revenues available.

6. Countries in Africa that experience war and authoritarian governments will experience less economic growth than those with sustained periods of peace and democratic government.

7. In the developing world, it will be a long time before environmental and climate change concerns have enough political clout to cause air pollution to be reduced more rapidly than the increasing scope of economic activity increases air pollution. As a result, emissions will not be reduced rapidly enough to stop continued global warming.

8. Nuclear power will spread to more countries.

9. Oil more be more expensive in real terms in 2020 and more expensive again in real terms in 2030 than it is today. Rising oil prices will make technologies that are powered by energy sources other than oil more attractive. This trend will be a global one, because oil trades in a global marketplace.

10. Oil rich countries that are not close to exhausting their reserves will receive an economic boost from rising oil prices.

11. North Korea's political and economic system will collapse, probably within a couple of decades, if it fails to open itself up to the rest of the world. If it does collapse, it will probably be reabsorbed by South Korea.

12. Public health measures will improve in most of the developing and undeveloped world that are not war torn as patents on new effective drugs expire and make those drugs more affordable.

13. Global fertility rates will fall as more countries become more economically developed.

14. Developing countries will become less religious as they become more economically developed in fairly close synch with falling fertility rates.

15. The need to impose taxes as oil revenues decline will force Middle Eastern monarchs who have not already been deposed in revolutions and democratized of their own free will to make genuine democratic reforms.

16. The proportion of the world population engaged in farming will fall steadily for decades to come.

17. Some small island nations will be swallowed up by the sea and forced to relocate all or most of their populations as sea levels rise with global warming sometime in the next century.

18. A large share of the world's languages, probably half or more, will die in the next few decades.

19. A significant number of plant and animal species will go extinct in the next few decades.

20. The proportion of Africans who are Christians will increase significantly over the next decade.

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On Fitness, Advanced Parental Age and Selection

Advanced parental age, i.e. having an older father, is a risk factor for a wide variety of genetic diseases (e.g. schizophrenia and autism). Advanced maternal age is generally not. In part, this is because older women lose fertility. In part, this is because a woman's eggs are created when she is young, even if they are not available for fertilization until much later, while a man's sperm are created on a regular basis, and so bear the environmental and aging impacts that his body experiences, a mutation risk load that mounts as he gets older.

While it isn't absolutely conclusively, the evidence very strongly points to mutations in sperm cells as the predominant cause of advanced paternal age related conditions, which makes a great deal of sense, simply because there aren't many other mechanisms by which advanced paternal age could cause diseases with a strong hereditary component. The only additional possible source is closely related - epigenetic impacts acquired by a father during life or at birth that are passed on to a child.

Having an older father is not an entirely bad thing, however, from an evolutionary genetics perspective. An older father, by definition, was fit enough to have live to be reasonably old, and to be fertile enough and able to successfully secure a mother for his child at that age. Evolutionarily speaking, older fathers should, by definition, generally be more fit than the average father, and certainly should be more fit than the average man who is born without regard to whether or not he has children.

There is anecdotal ethnographic evidence that older fathers also tend to have greater success in securing more fit than average mothers for their children. Men who married well the first time may have prospered in part because they had better than average wives. Widowers have often been considered prize catches, at least by parents arranging marriages, and most marriages were arranged from at least the Neolithic era until the last couple of centuries. If children of older fathers also tend to have more fit mothers on average (presumably because their fathers are more fit themselves), then the children receive a double fitness benefit in their genetic inheritance, and the maternal half of that benefit does not carry any elevated mutational risks. Certainly, anyway, there is little evidence that the children of older fathers tend to have less fit than average mothers.

Thus, while children of fathers of advanced paternal age are at greater than average risk of novel, harmful mutations (harmful here meaning evolutionary selective fitness disadvantage), their paternal genetic inheritance will generally be one associated with above average fitness. And, since many novel, harmful mutations lead to miscarriages or congenital defects, children of fathers of advanced paternal age who survive past infancy are not bearing the full cost of the additional mutational risk associated with their father's advanced age. In a more harsh age, marginally fit young children might also have received less than full parental support as resources were devoted instead to more fit siblings - infanticide was common place for much of human history, and only in modern times has it become the norm for all of one's children to survive to adulthood.

Even those children of fathers of advanced parental age who do end up having novel and harmful (but non-deadly) mutations will take a general background of above average fitness in their genetic inheritance together with the novel, harmful mutations. Often, the good will be better than the bad, and as a generally rule there will be both fitness enhancing and fitness reducing genetic traits in the child who also had novel, harmful mutations. Novel fitness enhancing mutations are also probably more likely in children of fathers of advanced paternal age, although the literature seems to suggest that fitness reducing mutations are far more common than fitness enhancing mutations. (Many, if not most, mutations neither enhance nor harm evolutionary fitness.)

Of course, the other disadvantage faced by children of fathers of advanced paternal age is an increased likelihood of being without a father or paternal grandparents when one is relatively young, and if fathers and paternal grandparents enhance one's fitness, in the evolutionary selection sense, then that is another strike against them. There is a school of human evolutionary thought that attributes great selective advantage to the extension of life expectancy long enough that the society has a reasonable number of grandparents alive at any given time, based on circumstantial evidence related to life expectancy and population sizes, but it isn't obvious that the benefits of having elders in a community are primarily a benefit to their own grandchildren, or are a benefit to the community generally, for example, by providing it with continuity of knowledge and culture.

Now, the babies of the brood of an older father are still at a disadvantage relative to their older siblings who may have all of their father's genetic fitness, because they will have none of the novel, harmful mutations associated with a father of advanced paternal age, and because they will have received the benefits of having a living father, and perhaps living grandparents, for a larger share of their life. The only real advantage that the babies of the brood have are the possibility that their mother is a subsequent more fit spouse than their older siblings, and the possibility that the parents improved their parenting skills over time after making mistakes the first times around. The babies may also compensate for possibly less paternal parenting with more older sibling support.

The source of fitness for an older father may be different now than it was in pre-modern times.

In pre-modern times, the main genetic windfall one might receive from an older father might have been the good health related traits that allowed him to live until forty years of age or older, while a significant share of his peers died by then, or become infertile by then, or ceased to be able to attract any women to be mothers for their children at that point.

In modern times, in contrast, postponing fatherhood is usually closely associated with having obtained an advanced education before marrying, and having developed a career and obtaining socio-economic success. Simply living to be that old and being able to be fertile enough with reproductive medicine to have children at an advanced age is now common place and has only trivial fitness implications, but attracting a fertile woman to be a mother for your children, and having a reason to defer childbearing is a pursuit that strongly favors traits that favor socio-economic success. Also, the likelihood of an older father dying before a child comes of age is now greatly reduced from pre-modern times, and marriages entered into when a father is more mature and economically successful tend to be more stable (although there are certainly a significant number of serial divocees who have children in each new marriage among older fathers). Older fathers are likely to have more children overall as well, possible forcing each child to receive a smaller share of inherited wealth, although it isn't obvious that property inheritance at death is a very important factor in life success these days.

Another significant subset of men who are more likely than average to be older fathers are men who seek to have as many children as possible for religious reasons. Razib at Gene Expression has made some notable posts exploring the demographic impacts of this trend in affluent societies. Basically, in poor societies, almost everyone is religious and almost everyone has as many children as they can in the hope that some will survive. With economic development, the vast majority of people become less religious and reduce their childbearing rates to replacement levels in short order in order to maximize the economic resources that they can devote to each child because they can have faith that the child will live to be an adult and have children of his or her own. But, a minority of people in developed societies make a conscious, usually religiously motivated choice to have as many children as they can anyway, and that choice has a major impact of the demographics of developed societies (which universally are not willing to let children in big families start and die due to a shortfall of resources, although China did take a very punitive stance to discourage the large family option as it developed with its one child policy for urban families). These demographic trends also have population genetic implications. From an evolutionary fitness perspective having as many kids as you possibly can even in an economically developed modern society is a great choice for you and your co-religionists (although it may be bad for society as a whole), so from an evolutionary selection perspective, an older father who religiously believes in having many children and passed that cultural trait on to his children has caused them to be much more evolutionarily fit.

Also, of course, most children of older fathers don't have any novel harmful mutations. They get their parents above average fitness while bearing not of the hardships associated with having a father of advanced paternal age (except that a sibling may have such issues and that may stress family resources, but that is rarely a deal breaker in modern societies, and was often resolved by the premature death of the unfit sibling in pre-modern societies). This means that the new child enhances the father's evolutionary fitness, on average, making the ex ante decision to have more children an easy one from a selection perspective, and leave the child fit as well.

All of this is very general, but it may also help to provide a general explanation of why genetic mutations associated with advanced paternal age (even in subsequent generations for children whose parents are young), may tend to receive counterbalancing selective advantages that have no direct causal relationship to any novel, harmful mutations that they may have received because they are descendant from a father of advanced parental age.

Indeed, some of the upsides associated with conditions associated with advanced paternal age such as creativity or logical aptitude or enhanced courtship traits, may be products of having more fit than average patriline ancestors rather than of something flowing from the advanced paternal age condition itself. If so, one would expect the upside associated with advanced paternal age conditions to present more strongly in first generation people with those conditions than in subsequent generations where a fit paternal genetic inheritance that came with the novel harmful mutations has been diluted.

As a footnote, with the genetic risk associated with having inbred children is largely avoidable by someone interested in having children, simply by choosing an unrelated mate, which is something that if often possible in modern societies, once you are an older father, you can't undo the decisions to have or not have children that you made earlier in life. Those are sunk costs and the only decision that a prospective older father has to make is to have or not have children. There is no easy mutation risk reducing option at that point. This also makes it an easier choice and helps explain why of two parenting choices that present similar genetic condition risk to offspring, one is usually prohibited legally and discouraged socially, while the other is rarely prohibited legally.

READ MORE - On Fitness, Advanced Parental Age and Selection

Abortion in China

[A reputable study in China last year] found . . .

• 22.4% of Chinese youth age 15 to 24 were participating in premarital sex
• 51.2% of those sexually active youths did not use any form of birth control
• More that 20% of the sexually active youths had experienced an unexpected pregnancy
• 91% of those youths had opted to end that pregnancy in abortion.

These estimates for pregnancy and abortion rates are . . . higher in studies that just look at university students. In one such study (which had 80,000 participants), 26% of sexually active students had an unexpected pregnancy with an abortion rate of 92%.

From here.

Westerners are more likely to have premarital sex, but via birth control, less likely to get pregnant and far less likely in every demographic (with the possible exceptions of pre-teens and rape victims) to get abortions. The study also found that knowledge about what birth control methods do and don't work is scarce in China, as 95% of women use “feminine wash”, as a form of birth control even though it doesn't actually work.

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