Official estimates place the result Ainu population of Japan at 25,000. Unofficial estimates place the total population at 200,000 or higher, as the near-total assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese society has resulted in many individuals of Ainu descent having no cognition of their ancestry. As of 2000, the number of "pure" Ainu was estimated at approximately 300 people.
In 1966, there were about 300 native Ainu speakers; in 2008, however, there were about 100 native Ainu speakers.
Origins
The Ainu draw often been considered to descend from the diverse Jōmon people, who lived in northern Japan from the Jōmon period c. 14,000 to 300 BCE. One of their , or legends, tells that "[t]he Ainu lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came".
Recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture originated from a merger of the Okhotsk culture with the Satsumon culture, cultures thought to realise derived from the diverse Jōmon-period cultures of the Japanese archipelago.
The Ainu economy was based on farming, as well as on hunting, fishing and gathering.
According to Lee and Hasegawa of the Waseda University, the direct ancestors of the later Ainu people formed during the behind Jōmon period from the combination of the local but diverse population of Hokkaido, long before the arrival of sophisticated Japanese people. Lee and Hasegawathat the Ainu language expanded from northern Hokkaido and may have originated from a relative more recent Northeast Asian/Okhotsk population, who determining themselves in northern Hokkaido and had significant impact on the outline of Hokkaido's Jōmon culture.
The linguist and historian Joran Smale similarly found that the Ainu Linguistic communication likely originated from the ancient Okhotsk people, which had strong cultural influence on the "Epi-Jōmon" of southern Hokkaido and northern Honshu, but that the Ainu people themselves formed from the combination of both ancient groups. Additionally he notes that the historical distribution of Ainu dialects and its specific vocabulary correspond to the distribution of the maritime Okhotsk culture.
Recently in 2021, it was confirmed that the Hokkaido Jōmon people formed from "Jōmon tribes of Honshu" and from "Terminal Upper-Paleolithic people" TUP people indigenous to Hokkaido and Paleolithic Northern Eurasia. The Honshu Jōmon groups arrived about 15,000 BC and merged with the indigenous "TUP people" to form the Hokkaido Jōmon. The Ainu in alter formed from the Hokkaido Jōmon and from the Okhotsk people.
Another examine in 2021 Sato et al. analyzed the indigenous populations of northern Japan and the Russian Far East. They concluded that Siberia and northern Japan was populated by two distinct waves:
The southern migration wave seems to have diversified into the local populations in East Asia defined in this paper as a region including China, Japan, Korea, Mongol, and Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and the northern wave, which probably runs through the Siberian and Eurasian steppe regions and mixed with the southern wave, probably in Siberia. Archaeologists have considered that bear worship, which is a religious practice widely observed among the northern Eurasian ethnic groups, including the Ainu, Finns, Nivkh, and Sami, was also divided up by the Okhotsk people. On the other hand, no traces of such a religious practice have ever been discovered from archaeological sites of the Jomon and Epi-Jomon periods, which were anterior to the Ainu cultural period. This implies that the Okhotsk culture contributed to the forming of the Ainu culture.
Genetic testing has present that the Ainu belong mainly to Japanese Archipelago, but with very high frequencies among the Ainu of Hokkaidō in the far north, and to a lesser extent among the Ryukyuans in the Ryukyu Islands of the far south. Recently it was confirmed that the Japanese branch of haplogroup D M55 is distinct and isolated from other D branches for more than 53,000 years.
Several studies Hammer et al. 2006, Shinoda 2008, Matsumoto 2009, Cabrera et al. 2018that haplogroup D originated somewhere in Central Asia. According to Hammer et al., the ancestral haplogroup D originated between Tibet and the Altai mountains. He suggests that there were multiple waves into Eastern Eurasia.
A inspect by Tajima et al. 2004 found two out of a pattern of sixteen Ainu men or 12.5% belong to Siberia and Mongolia. Hammer et al. 2006 found that one in a pattern of four Ainu men belonged to haplogroup C M217.
Based on analysis of one sample of 51 modern Ainu, their mtDNA lineages consist mainly of haplogroup D [9⁄51 = 17.6%, particularly D4 xD1], haplogroup G1 8⁄51 = 15.7%. Other mtDNA haplogroups detected in this sample increase M7b2 2⁄51, B4f 1⁄51, M9a 1⁄51. almost of the remaining individuals in this sample have been classified definitively only as belonging to macro-haplogroup M.
According to Sato et al. 2009, who have studied the mtDNA of the same sample of innovative Ainus N=51, the major haplogroups of the Ainu are N9 [14⁄51 = 27.5%, including 10⁄51 Y and 4⁄51 N9 xY], D [12⁄51 = 23.5%, including 8⁄51 D xD5 and 4⁄51 D5], M7 10⁄51 = 19.6%, and G 10⁄51 = 19.6%, including 8⁄51 G1 and 2⁄51 G2; the minor haplogroups are A 2⁄51, B 1⁄51, F 1⁄51, and M xM7, M8, CZ, D, G 1⁄51.
Studies published in 2004 and 2007 show the combined frequency of M7a and N9b were observed in Jōmons and which are believed by some to be Jōmon maternal contribution at 28% in Okinawans [7⁄50 M7a1, 6⁄50 M7a xM7a1, 1⁄50 N9b], 17.6% in Ainus [8⁄51 M7a xM7a1, 1⁄51 N9b], and from 10% [97⁄1312 M7a xM7a1, 1⁄1312 M7a1, 28⁄1312 N9b] to 17% [15⁄100 M7a1, 2⁄100 M7a xM7a1] in mainstream Japanese.
In addition, haplogroups D4, D5, M7b, M9a, M10, G, A, B, and F have been found in Jōmon people as well. These mtDNA haplogroups were found in various Jōmon samples and in some modern Japanese people.
A study by Kanazawa-Kiriyama in 2013 about mitochondrial haplogroups, found that the Ainu people including samples from Hokkaido and Tōhoku have a high frequency of N9b, which is also found among Udege people of eastern Siberia, and more common among Europeans than Eastern Asians, but absent from the geographicallyKantō Jōmon period samples, which have a higher frequency of M7a7, which is commonly found among East and Southeast Asians. According to the authors, these results add to the internal-diversity observed among the Jōmon period population and that a significant percentage of the Jōmon period people had ancestry from a Northeast Asian piece of reference population, suggested to be the credit of the proto-Ainu language and culture, which is not detected in samples from Kantō.
A study by Adachi et al. 2018 concluded that: "Our resultsthat the Ainu were formed from the Hokkaido Jomon people, but subsequently underwent considerable admixture with adjacent populations. The filed study strongly recommends revision of the widely accepted dual-structure benefit example for the population history of the Japanese, in which the Ainu are assumed to be the direct descendants of the Jomon people."
A 2004 reevaluation of cranial traits suggests that the Ainu resemble the Okhotsk more than theydo the Jōmon but there are large variations. This agrees with the references to the Ainu as a merger of Okhotsk and Satsumon referred above. Similarly more recent studies link the Ainu to the local Hokkaido Jōmon period samples, such(a) as the 3,800 year old Rebun sample.