Introduction
They are natives of Japan and southeast Russia. Their have long history, language and unique DNA. The culture they created is magnificent!!!! Religion 4 them is animistic. There have been in contact with the Japanese ova 2000!!!
History
They are the descendants of the Jomon people. The Jomon were prehistoric inhabitants of Japan. The Ainu are hunter-gathers. In the 13th century they were raided by Nivkh and Udege. In the 1700s they traded fur with the Japanese. The Japanese government tried to force them to assimilate, after they conquered them. They forced them on to farms and made them speak Japanese in schools. The Ainu have indigenous rights given by the U.N.
Language
It has 3 different dialects, spoken on different islands. This language went into decline last century because of cultural genocide. It shares sum vocabulary with Nivkh. Their sentences are structured subject, object and verb. It is written using Katakana, which is a type of Japanese script. There are people trying to make Ainu language and culture popular again.
DNA
Autosomal: They are a mixture of Jomon, Siberian, and Yamato people.
X: Only 51 people X chromosome been studied. Based on that, about half of this chromosome is unique to them. The other half with East Asian and Siberians.
Y: Only 16 men Y chromosome been studied. From that, it was discovered it's East Asian and Siberian.
They are mixture of Siberians and East Asians; that's what the genetic studies show. But quite a few of them favor Europeans and Aboriginals. That's because they have genes for straight hair and facial features of white people. I don't know of any genetic relationship they have with Aborigines.
Culture
It comes from Jomon and Siberian peoples that lived in Japan in prehistoric times. The people that lived on Sakhalin practiced mummification. They lived in villages called kotan. It consisted of 5 or 6 houses. They built kotans near estuaries 4 fishing. There was 4 castes in those societies. They are as follows: chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves. Chiefs held most of the wealth. If someone had a dispute with someone else they would debate it @ a fortified compound. There wasn't any death penalty; but there was serve punishments 4 certain crimes.
Religion
Their religion has similarities to Shinto. They believed everything had a spirit in it. They believed in a spirit world and a physical world. They had a special ceremony called lomante. A wild boar was ritually murdered, releasing the spirit of the bear god. Then the bear was eating. Corpses were buried in mountains. A few of them covert to Christianity of the Russian Orthodox flavor centuries ago. But they were frowned upon by everybody else. Most Ainu are Buddhist today.
References
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/ainu-history-of-the-indigenous-people-of-japan
https://teacherscollegesj.org/where-did-the-ainu-originally-come-from/
duckduckgo.com
wikipedia.org
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ainu
https://historyrise.com/the-ainu-people-study-guide/
