Even if migration makes the breaking news today, it is of all times. The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages, i.e. Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic, is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements. In our ERC eurasia3angle project we addressed this question through ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We reported new, wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including the most comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary presented to date, an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia, and the first collection of ancient genomes from the Liao River Region, the Amur, Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan. Challenging the traditional ‘Pastoralist Hypothesis’, we showed that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking significant progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence, we showed that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture. Our research is key to a better understanding of the human, cultural and linguistic diversity in East Asia, one of the world’s major theaters of human evolution. Our results are important for society because as humans, our search for identity depends on understanding who we are and where we come from.
