The family of so-called trans-Eurasian languages, which – among others – includes Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Tungusic and Turkish, probably originated in rural China about 9,000 years ago and its spread was based on expansion of agriculture, according to new scientific estimates.
The trans-Eurasian language family – sometimes known as the Altaic – now extends from Turkey in the west to Japan, Korea and Siberia in the east. Despite its great spread over an area of ​​over 8,000 kilometers and the use of these languages ​​by hundreds of millions of people, to this day there are intense scientific controversies about its more or less mysterious origin.
Researchers from several countries, led by Professor Martine Robetez, head of the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Jena’s archeological research group at the German Institute for Human History, published their (98 language analysis), archaeogenetics (study of ancient DNA by 23 people who lived in Asia 300 to 9,000 years ago) and archeology (from finds in 255 sites in East Asia during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages).
The new interdisciplinary study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, has created a family language “tree” with the help of artificial intelligence algorithms. He concluded that the ancestral “cradle” of the trans-Eurasian languages ​​(estimated at about 80 today) was, around 7200 BC. (Early Neolithic period), the first farmers to cultivate millet, a type of cereal, in the Liao River Valley of northeastern China and Inner Mongolia. After the melting of the ice and the emergence of agriculture on Earth, millet was an important early agricultural crop, which allowed hunter-gatherers to move to a more static rural way of life.
As these farmers, in the late Neolithic period, began to replace millet with wheat and rice and move more widely in Northeast Asia, their proto-Eurasian language spread elsewhere, as far as the Siberian steppes and the Korean coast. Thus, through mixing with local populations, there was a gradual differentiation into individual language disciplines and cultures. In the archipelago of Japan e.g. New agricultural practices, along with the new language, are estimated to have arrived around 1000 BC, while on the Korean Peninsula they had arrived a little earlier, in 1300 BC.
The new theory, called the “agricultural hypothesis”, disputes the so-called “pastoral hypothesis”, which proposes a more recent origin of the trans-Eurasian language family, around 2000 to 1000 BC, as well as their spread through nomads with starting point in the eastern steppes.
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