Ryukyu islanders have ancestors from Shandong

Through nuclear genome research, Chinese scientists have recently discovered that people from the Ryukyu Islands have ancestral roots in Shandong province. On Feb 3, Nature Communications published online the research results titled "East Asian gene flow bridged by northern coastal populations over the past 6,000 years", a collaborative effort between Fu's team, Shandong University's Institute of Cultural Heritage, the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and the Jinan Archaeological Institute, focusing on the systematic nuclear genome research of people from the Shandong region dating back approximately 6,000 to 1,500 years. The study systematically depicts communication among inland-coastal-island populations in East Asia over the past 6,000 years, using Shandong as a bridge on an east-west scale based on ancient genomic data, Fu said. "The connection between populations in the northern coastal regions of East Asia and ancient populations in the Ryukyu Islands remains unclear." The study, focusing on the ancient populations in the northern coastal regions of East Asia and radiating their surrounding northern inland and island populations, marks the first systematic nuclear genome research with a long time span and wide geographical range, updating and filling in previous controversies and related model hypotheses, the institute said.