Threads of the East Asian Shoreline

Across nearly eleven millennia the coastal margins of East Asia served as both crucible and corridor. Archaeological deposits from sites such as Gaofeng Cave (Nandan County, Guangxi, China) and shell midden sequences at Funagura (Kurashiki, Honshu) and Hijaro (Ainan, Shikoku) show long-term maritime adaptation: persistent exploitation of fish, shellfish and estuarine resources, and early ceramic technologies in local hunter-gatherer contexts. In the Korean peninsula, cave burials and early settlement traces at Daeseong-dong and Yuha-ri (Gyeongsangnam-do) mark continuity from Late Pleistocene foragers through Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions.

The material record indicates multiple cultural phases referenced locally as the Layi and Qinchang periods in China, the Early to Late Jomon in Japan, and Changhang through the Three Kingdoms in Korea. These cultural labels reflect changing subsistence, craft and social complexity rather than single, homogeneous peoples. Archaeological data indicates pulses of innovation — pottery, metallurgy, and rice agriculture — arriving at different times along the coast, producing mosaic societies.

Genetically, persistent maternal lineages (notably mtDNA N9b and D) and deep-rooted paternal markers (haplogroup D and C) point to a long-standing hunter-gatherer foundation in the region, later admixed with lineages commonly associated with expansion of agriculture (haplogroup O). Limited chronological and geographic sampling across the 59 individuals means models of population movement remain provisional; archaeological context is essential to interpret genome-scale signals.

The genetic assemblage of 59 ancient individuals from sites across Japan, South Korea and southern China provides a multi-layered picture. Mitochondrial haplogroups show a strong presence of N9b (9 samples) and D (8 samples), lineages often associated with longstanding coastal and insular hunter-gatherer populations in the region. These maternal signatures are consistent with archaeological continuity in shell-midden and cave contexts and align with broader research that links N9b and certain D subclades to pre-agricultural populations of the Japanese archipelago and neighboring coasts.

On the paternal side, haplogroup D appears in 4 individuals — a lineage frequently observed in ancient and some modern populations of East Asia and Japan — while haplogroups O (2) and C (2) suggest contributions from later northern or agricultural-adapted populations. The presence of O, in particular, is often correlated with expansions tied to millet and rice farming across East Asia in the Holocene, though direct attribution requires autosomal evidence and careful temporal control.

Genome-wide patterns (where available) typically reveal admixture between deep local hunter-gatherer ancestry and incoming farmer-related ancestries. However, the temporal span of these samples (9798 BCE–1950 CE) and uneven geographic sampling mean that regional continuity and episodic migration both shaped present-day genetic landscapes. Archaeogenetic interpretations should therefore be treated as evolving hypotheses, refined as more temporally and spatially targeted samples are analyzed.