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Shirokogorov on the physical anthropology of northern Koreans in more detail
Topic Started: Apr 28 2018, 07:04:41 PM (47 Views)
black man
The Right Hand
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Shirokogorov mentioned the Koreans he observed and measured in side notes of his book the northern Han Chinese physical anthropology only. Some of the relevant metric data are present in this book, too. So his statements can be used as a starting point for a discussion.

The sample itself is from northern Korea and from a possibly neighbouring "maritime" part of the RFE according to Shirokogorov's introduction to the book. In this sense, a common background of many if not all of the samples in Hamgyongbuk-do seems to be plausible.

Shirokogorov considered his samples to be typologically mixed: above all, he observed people he associated with his "type B". And the description of the people he associated with this type seems to overlap with Cho Yong-Jin's description of a "coastal"/"Palaeoasiatic" anthropological type. So I'll skip the exact description which is anyway more anecdotal rather than statistical. What is maybe more interesting is that he actually associated "type B" with Nivkhs in particular.

Levin wrote on Nivkh data from three different locations, based on which one might conclude that there are at least three different "anthropological types" among them:
- coastal aboriginal ("Palaeoasiatic")
- inland ("Baikalian")-admixed
- Ainu-admixed

Of these, it's obviously the coastal aboriginal ("Palaeoasiatic") type which Shirokogorov considered to be the most ancient in the Amur region and which could be interesting in terms of potential ethno-geographical continuity in the region from the lower Amur to northeastern coastal Korea. Such a kind of continuity along the coastal lines of Korea seems to be plausible considering the mtDNA hg profiles recently published as for samples from Jeollanam-do and, especially, Jeju-do. There are no comparable genetic data from Hamgyongbuk-do, though. In this sense, one could speculate whether there could be something like a gradual transition from one to another major type or from one major type to several major types etc.

Moreover, Shirokogorov claimed, his "type A" (typical for northern Han from the lower Huanghe region in particular) was "not more than incidental" in Korea (p. 102). Rather, it he seems to have observed individuals whose descriptions could have fit those of "transitional types". The very fact that his observations were perhaps limited to Koreans from one particular region only does not allow any definite conclusions from his data only, though. For this reason some more threads on the physical anthropology of Koreans from different parts of the Korean peninsula could be of interest.

And more generally, one might already add that the so-called "Palaeoasiatic" component, if it exists, will possibly turn out to be composed of peoples of, e.g., "northern", "southern" and "other" backgrounds still to be clarified. Nivkh physical anthropology might be a potentially relevant reference point concerning some anthropological questions. But the ancestors of the Nivkhs might already have been influenced by prehistorical and historical events which caused genetic bottleneck effects, different kinds of admixtures etc. Therefore, Nivkh anthropology can only be one possible "northern" reference point. But there should be other reference points as well.

Sources:
Cho Yong-Jin 2004: "The Physical and Cultural Faces of the Korean People"
Levin 1958
Shirokogorov 1923: "Anthropology of Northern China"
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