These facts seem to suggest that the Japanese reached Japan only recently from the Asian mainland...But if that were true, you might expect the Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language, just as English is obviously closely related to other Germanic languages...How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan's presumably ancient language and the evidence for recent origins?
During the Ice Ages, land bridges connected Japan's main islands to one another and to the mainland, allowing mammals -- including humans -- to arrive on foot. Archeologists have proposed four conflicting theories. Most popular in Japan is the view that the Japanese gradually evolved from ancient Ice Age people who occupied Japan long before 20,000 B.C. Also widespread in Japan is a theory that the Japanese descended from horse-riding Asian nomads who passed through Korea to conquer Japan in the fourth century, but who were themselves -- emphatically -- not Koreans. A theory favored by many Western archeologists and Koreans, and unpopular in some circles in Japan, is that the Japanese are descendants of immigrants from Korea who arrived with rice-paddy agriculture around 400 B.C.
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via Darwin Catholic
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