Japanese are part proto-Nordic

In the K = 5 craniometric admixture analysis, the Caucasoid component was modal for the northern Japanese (from Hokkaido), and it also made up a lot of the admixture in the southern Japanese (from northern Kyushu). In the post I dismissed this as spurious, saying “There’s no genetic, historical, or archaeological evidence that Caucasoids ever made up a large part of any Far Eastern population, so it’s very likely that the Caucasoid component is showing up in individuals from those populations because those individuals have low levels of archaic admixture”.

Then there are Dienekes’ craniometric f3 statistics showing that Japanese skulls are mixtures of Eskimo skulls and Peruvian skulls. My first explanation of this result, in this comment, was that Eskimo skulls were like those of the Mongoloid Yayoi, and Peruvian skulls were like those of the Polynesoid Jomon. But then the K = 4 craniometric admixture analysis showed that I got that backwards, and that it is the Eskimo skulls that are more Polynesoid, and the Peruvian skulls that are more Mongoloid. But now the K = 5 craniometric admixture analysis has shown that the Peruvian skulls are actually more Caucasoid than they are Mongoloid.

All of this led me to apply the same K = 4 DIYDodecad calculator that I applied to the Amerindians to the Japanese. And the results show that the Japanese are indeed partially Caucasoid. An admixture plot is below. The colors are the same as in the Amerindian plot.

The mean admixture proportions for the HGDP Japanese samples are 91.50% Mongoloid, 5.31% Nordic, 2.25% Mediterranean, and 0.94% Negroid. The total Caucasoid admixture is therefore 7.56%.

I think that the Negroid admixture is actually Negritoid. Y haplogroup D has a frequency of 87.5% in the Ainu and between 25% and 50% in the Japanese, depending on the region. D was originally a Negritoid haplogroup.

I think that the Mediterranean admixture is due to the fact that the Caucasoids who came to Japan came sometime in the middle of Nordic evolution, between 40 ka and 25 ka, and were therefore still partially Mediterranean.

Nordics or proto-Nordics at one time inhabited all of northern Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They were mammoth hunters, and they followed the herds over this entire range.

Archaeological evidence of this is found in the Mal’ta-Buret’ culture, near Lake Baikal. That culture produced Venus figurines out of mammoth ivory, dated to 23,000 years ago, that are very similar to those found all over Europe.

Joseph Birdsell believed that the prehistoric inhabitants of the area around the Amur River were Caucasoid. Birdsell was absolutely right about the peopling of Sahul, and I now believe that he was right about the Amurians as well.

The proto-Nordic admixture in the Japanese explains why they took so readily to Western civilization, and why today Japan is the most advanced nation in Asia.