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Review
. 2020 Oct 14:2:e52.
doi: 10.1017/ehs.2020.49. eCollection 2020.

Archaeolinguistic evidence for the farming/language dispersal of Koreanic

Mark J Hudson  1 , Martine Robbeets  1
Affiliations
Review

Archaeolinguistic evidence for the farming/language dispersal of Koreanic

Mark J Hudson et al. Evol Hum Sci. .

Abstract

While earlier research often saw Altaic as an exception to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, recent work on millet cultivation in northeast China has led to the proposal that the West Liao basin was the Neolithic homeland of a Transeurasian language family. Here, we examine the archaeolinguistic evidence used to associate millet farming dispersals with Proto-Macro-Koreanic, analysing the identification of population movements in the archaeological record, the role of small-scale cultivation in language dispersals, and Middle-Late Neolithic demography. We conclude that the archaeological evidence is consistent with the arrival and spread of Proto-Macro-Koreanic on the peninsula in association with millet cultivation in the Middle Neolithic. This dispersal of Proto-Macro-Koreanic occurred before an apparent population crash after 3000 BC, which can probably be linked with a Late Neolithic decline affecting many regions across northern Eurasia. We suggest plague (Yersinia pestis) as one possible cause of an apparently simultaneous population decline in Korea and Japan.

Keywords: Archaeolinguistics; Korea; Neolithic; Transeurasian; Yersinia pestis; agriculture.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare none.

Figures

None
Graphical abstract
Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The linguistic landscape of the Korean peninsula in time and space. 1a: ca. 3500 BC Proto-Macro-Koreanic separates from Proto-Japanic on the Liaodong peninsula and enters the Korean peninsula; 1b: ca. 1500 BC Proto-Japanic enters the Korean peninsula from the Liaodong and Shandong peninsulas; 1c: ca. 300 AD Japanic Puyŏ languages are spread from the Liaodong peninsula to the Korean peninsula; the Macro-Koreanic Han languages, Paekche, Kaya and Silla are situated in the south of the Korean peninsula; pockets of Japanic languages are scattered among Paekche and Kaya languages.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Classification of Japano-Koreanic based on classical comparative historical linguistic inferences (adapted from Robbeets, 2015).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Different hypotheses for the arrival of Proto-Macro-Koreanic on the Korean peninsula. (a) Proto-Macro-Koreanic arrived after Proto-Japanic from Liaodong and the Changbaishan region with the introduction of bronze daggers around 300 BC (Whitman 2011). (b) Proto-Macro-Koreanic arrived simultaneously with Proto-Japanic from the Liaodong and Shandong peninsulas with the introduction of rice agriculture around 1300 BC (Kim & Park, 2020). (c) Proto-Macro-Koreanic arrived before Proto-Japanic from the Liaodong peninsula with the introduction of millet agriculture around 3500 BC (Robbeets, 2017a, b).
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References

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