FRUITFUL FORMOSANS: THE HOKKAIDO HYPOTHESIS
The Polynesian Triangle is formed by three points located in New Zealand (Maoris), Easter Island (Pascuans) and the archipelago of Hawaii (native Hawaiians). The related peoples living in Micronesia are to the north-west of it, while, to the west, lies Melanesia, whose older black-skinned populations, as said above, is akin to Australia's Aboriginals and a series of smaller tribes and nations still living in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Yemen and the Philippines (forming a kind of living bridge between Africa and Australia). The Malay Universe covers the present countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei and Timor Leste, plus the coasts of Papua New Guinea, a country that could be nicknamed Little Africa for different reasons that would be part of a planned new article, later on.
The Ryukyus archipelago was a chinese protectorate (a nominally independant kingdom under the protection of Beijing), for centuries, before being annexed by Japan in the XIXth century. The People's Republic of China presently seems to be using the precedent of that ancient protectorate to pressure Japan with the threat of a potential claim to those islands, whose population speaks languages that are part of the Japonic linguistic family, along with Japanese, by far the best-known of them all.
There is a possibility that the population of the Ryukyus archipelago and of the Japanese archipelago are related to the indigenous population of Taiwan, a group of small nations collectively known as Formosans (from Formosa, the name given by explorers from Portugal to designate that island off the coast of China).
The Hokkaido Hypothesis, in a few words, is that the roots of the Japonic languages (and hence of the population as such) of both archipelagos are in Taiwan. In other words, it is conceivable that the Formosans indigenous populations living on Taiwan are the very distant ancestors of the people presently living in Japan and the Ryukyus, from Formosa to the very tip of the area of distribution of the Japonic languages, i.e. the island of Hokkaido, the northermost island of the Japanese archipelago, just south of the island of Sakhalin and southwest of the Kurils archipelago.
A sub-hypothesis, the Yanbian Variation, postulate that the Koreanic languages could also be an emanation of the Formosans, with a diffusion along the following axis: Formosa Island / Ryukyus archipelago / Kyushu Island/ Jeju Island and-or South Korea / North Korea / Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (China), the last one mentionned being at the extreme northern part of the continuous range covered by that small linguistic family. Korean is also spoken in Central Asia (forced migrations at the time of the Soviet Union), and in diverse cities, mainly in the West and Japan, through free emigration.
If attested and confirmed by linguistics experts, the Hokkaido Hypothesis and the Korean Sub-Hypothesis would mean that the early Formosans, eons ago, already recognized as the ancestors of the Malay languages, the Micronesian languages, the Polynesian languages and the languages of most of the population living on the island of Madagascar (the exceptions being the Bantu-speaking populations living on the western and northern coasts of La Grande Île, just off the coast of mainland Africa, opposite Mozambique), might also be the ancestors of the Japanese and the Koreans, whose tongues were long thought to be mere isolates by linguists, that is to say, languages apparently unrelated to any other, much like Basque, spoken in Northeast Spain and in three cantons of Southwest France, i.e. on both sides of the Pyrennees mountains. The difficult terrain and the isolation from the great centers of trade and knowledge may have saved Basque from eventual extinction.
The Basques are widely considered to bee remnant of the population living in long-ago Europe, before the great Indo-European migrations that transformed the linguistic and ethnic landscape of that peninsula of Eurasia, along with the Etruscans (whose language is now extinct) and the Iberians (whose language is also extinct). Languages, usually, are closely or loosely related, and form linguistic families, like the Romance languages of Southern Europe (deriving from the Latin spoken in the western part of the Roman Empire), the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, or the Germanic languages of Northern Europe.
AUTRONESIAN LANGUAGES
Austronesian languages are spoken by about 390 millions persons, mainly in Indonesia and the Philippines. It is the fifth linguistic family in terms of number of speakers, the second in terms of number of different languages. Since the pioneering work of the great Robert Blust (1999), it is now known that the source of all those languages is to be found in the indigenous inhabitants of the island of Formosa (Taiwan), sometime called Formosans to distinguished them from the great majority of the population of this disputed country/province, which is from Chinese stock and origin. On the mainland, the Formosans are called Gaoshans.
According to modern linguistics, Austronesian languages is divided in ten main branches, nine on the island (collectively known as Formosan languages) and one outside of the island (known as Malayo-Polynesian languages, or Extra-Formosan languages), which is to say in the rest of the vast linguistic area now occupied by the family, across the Pacific and Indian oceans.
THE HOKKAIDO HYPOTHESIS
The Hokkaido Hypothesis postulate that a part of the Malayo-Polynesian branch (or possibly a part of the nine Formosan branches, or maybe an hypothetic eleventh branch) went North-East, instead of down South, like the ancestors of the Malayo-Polynesians, who first went to Luzon (the big northern island of the Philippines), which became in effect the stepping stone toward the rest of what is now the Malay cultural universe, the Micronesian cultural universe, the Polynesian cultural universe and the Malgache cultural universe.
The North-East branch went up the Ryukyus archipelago, island by island, and then spread along the Japanese archipelago, again island by island, starting by the sourthermost, Kyushu, up to the very tip of the very last Japanese island, Hokkaido, pushing akong the way the indigenous Ainus ever northward, till those Ainus found themselves restricted in their present territory, where they lived as minorities (Hokkaido Island -along with mainly Japanese people-, Sakhalin Island -among with mainly Russian people-, and the Kurils archipelago -among with mainly Russian people).
Behind that Hypothesis, and to the source of it, lies what may be called the principle of diffusion. It propose that diffusion, in the many forms it can take in human metrics (linguistic, cultural, geneetic, etc.) implies a movement from a concentrated source to a diluted destination, through time. Let's see some applications of it.
The Out of Africa theory is well known and stipulate the now-well establish fact that humans spread from the continent of Africa to the rest of thw world. That has genetics conseuqneces. For the purpose of demonstration. Let's suppose that there was only a total of 100,000 humains on Earth, all in Africa, at moment A, arbitrarily set a long, long, long time ago. Those 100,000 persons holds, of course, 100 % of the genetic variety presently found in our flesh.
Let's say that, starting at moment A, a part of that population start leaving Africa, in tribes, clans, families or simply as indididuals, gradually, decades after decades, on the model of th English colonization of the thirtheen colonies, the French colonization of New-France or the Dutch colonization of South Africa, that is to say that it was of not the whole population of the country of origin that left Europe to the new lands, but only a part of it, in a gradual manner.
Let's suppose that, in the process of that migration, 20 % of the original inhabitants (or their descendants) had left to settle in the new continents existing beyond Africa. That would mean that 20 % of the human genes have moved to the new continents and that the remainder, 80 %, is still carried out in the 80 % of the population that stayed Africa.
At moment B, arbitrarily set a number of thousands of years after the beginning of extra-Africa colonization, the population living outside of Africa, amid vast amounts of territory full of food in the form of animals, berries, fishes, etc., has grown explosively, and from the mark of 20,000 persons, have now reach the mark of a million persons. At the same time, the population who has never left Africa (80,000 persons), has grown much more slowly, since they live in the exact same habitat, with the same ressources. Let's say, arbitrarily, that they have reach again the 100,000 mark.
What it mean, is that 20 % of the total human population who has left Africa now represent 80 % of the total human population. But their share of the genetic pool is still now much the same, since they left with 20 % of the genetic pool, and retain only that proportion of 20 %. By contrast, those who never left Africa still have 80 % of the gene pool, even though they now represent now only a tenth of the human total population. That is why, in other words, small African villages, located sometimes a few kilometres apart are more genetically diverse that, say, the popultaion of Germany is from the population of China. It explain why Africa, mainly Black Africa, is the place where can be found the greater diversity in matters of genes, cultures, tongues, societies, etc. Each tribe, no matter how small, is a society in and by itself.
All that is why Africa is the most diverse part of the planet. It is where the genepool is the most concentrated, while the rest of the world is where the same genepool is the least diluted.
Another exemple of the principle of diffusion is simply the way the Austronesians themselves spread in the course of the last five millenium . Most of the genepool of that cultural group remains in the veins of the half-million Formosans, descendants of the 'nine tribes' in a manner of speaking. The remainder flows in the veins of all the descendants of those who migrated out of Taiwan, toward the far reaches of the vast Indo-Pacific region, where lives the hundred of millions of persons who are issued from the wayward 'tenth tribe', so to speak.
Following that same principle of diffusion, it is not farfetch to imagine a scenario where some Formosans, again in tribes, clans, families, or simply as individuals, leaves what is now Taiwan to spread to the nearby islands of the Ryukyus chain, island by island. The isolation provides by the distance between very small islands could easily explain why their common language progressively became different dialects, then different languages, all along the archipelago that went from Taiwan to Kyushu.
When the migration reached the last-mentionned island, much larger, the first of the four large Japanese islands constituting the Japanase archipelago, the number of settlers grew significatively and the abondance of ressources permitted much larger groupings. The early Japaneses then expanded northward, slowly, decade after decade, century after century, till they reached Hokkaido, settled remarkedly late, in moderm time, because of the resistance of the earlier inhabitants, the Ainu and/or the Ennishi. Had the modern State of Japan been powerful enough to retain South Sakhalin (Karafuto Prefecture) and the Kurils, againts the stronger Russians (living in Tsarist Russia, then in the later-on USSR), those regions would probably be inhabited today by a large majority of Japanese peuple.
That Hokkaido Hypothesis would both explain the large number of Ryukyan languages, that are still spoken (or used to be spoken) on the small islands of the Ryukyu archipelago, and the unicity of the largest Japonic language, Japanese. Presently, the scenario that prevails among linguists, despite the scarcity of sources, is that the early Japonic languages emberge on the Asiatic mainland, went south to the tip of the Korean peninsula, jumped to Kyushu, and then forked in two, A) with one branch going South-West, along the islands of the Ryukyu chain, where they divided in the many small Ryukyuan languages, B) and one branch going North-East, becoming Japanese along the way, and following the Japanese archipelago to its tip on Hokkaido.
The problem, with that scenario, is that there is scant evidence of it, found in areas of the Korean peninsula. That lack of evidence make it difficult to prove it in a definitive way, hence the eventual or potential appeal of a possible alternative: the Hokkaido Hypothesis.
THE YANBIAN VARIATION
The Yanbian Variation of the Hokkaido Hypothesis postulate that the spread of a hypothetic Japonic branch of Austronesian up the Ryukyu and the Japanese archipelagos was accompanied by a spread of early Koreanic languages up the Korean peninsula and into the reaches of Inner Manchuria, where is located the Yanbian Korean autonomous region.
To link the Hokkaido Hypothesis with the Korean Sub-Hypothesis, on must imagine that the early Ryukyuans, when reaching the island of Kyushu, divided in two branches, A) one going straight north, across the not-very-large Tshushima Strait, B) one continuing along the chain formed by other three islands of the Japanese archipelago. The waves of migrants might have reach the island of Jeju first and the Asiatic mainland second, or the reverse. It probably does not matter a lot to know wich was first, in the long run, given the proximity of the two. What is sure is that the language of the first settlers of Jeju start to diverge at ont point from the early Korean, becoming the Jeju language, a Koreanic language that is, so far, the only known relative of Korean.
From the southernmost tip of the peninsula, the proto-Korean language (and the population speaking it) spread north, again slowly and progressively, while absorbing or pushing back earlier inhabitants, till they reaches of fastness of Manchuria, homeland of the Manchus and many other tribes and nations beside. The Manchus, of course, are those who, after conquering Imperial China, created the last Chinese Imperal dynasty. The Chinese people -that is to say the Hans- started settling Manchuria in their millions quite late in their history, not before the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth, till they became, by far, the majority of the population in that North-Eastern part of today's China).
LAST WORDS
A lot of time may passe before the Hokkaido Hypothesis and the Yanbian Variation are proved or disproved. If enough evidence, material, linguistic or otherwise, are found to establish it, it would mean that the Formosans, who likely came from Mainland China in ancient times, have engendered a part of the human population that was quite larger than previously thought. Not only, would they have been the progenitors of the languages of the malay world, the micronesian world, the polynesian world and the malgache world, but they would also be responsible for all the languages (and the present inhabitants) of North-East Asia. Japanese and Korean were long seen as isolates languages, then as part of very small linguistic families of their own, the Japonic one and the Koreanic one. In the end, they may simply prove to be subfamilies of the quite large Austranesian linguistic family, one of the most important subdivisions of the Terran population...
Fruitful Formans, indeed.
General map of Northeast Asia (source: World Atlas). The Yanbian Korean
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https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1652215856905191424
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MORE: @charles.millar3 (Twitter)
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