9。The Asian Isolates

1. Ainu:

The Ainu are an indigenous ethnic group in Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, much of Sakhalin and the southernmost Kamchatka peninsula. The word "ainu" means "human" in the Ainu language, and the ancient Japanese call them 蝦夷 (Emishi, Ezo or Yezo).

Although having uncertain origins, the Ainu are considered by many to have been derived from an ancient proto-Asian stock that may have occupied most of Asia before the Tungusic and Turkic expansions. In the early 1920s, anthropologists debated what typological classification, between Mongoloid or Caucasoid, the Ainu belonged to, because the Ainu tend to have long faces, high noses, deep eye sockets and hairy bodies, a proposal that had since been thoroughly discredited.

The Ainu believe in Animism, or that everything in nature has a "kami", i.e., spirit or god, on the inside.

2. Nivkh:

Anthropologically, the Nivkhs belong to the Sakhalin-Amur subgroup of the Mongoloid racial type. They are of short stature (male around 160 cm tall), with a broad flat face, a snub nose and thick lips. Unlike other Mongoloids, the Nivkh have a relatively dark skin, and dark eyes and hair. They have remarkably dense beards, perhaps under the influence of the Ainu.

The Nivkh people live in the lower Amur and on the northern Sakhalin. Nivkh is what they call themselves, whilst Gilyak is what the Manchu call them. Their tongue, the Nivkh (Nivxi), is a language that so far is not proven to be related to any other language anywhere. The Nivkh language is unique in many ways, e.g., the Nivkh number system has approximately seven ways to express each number depending on the shape of the object. The Nivkh are considered to have originated from the neolithic aboriginal inhabitants of the Pacific coastal Siberia, who have subsequently been replaced by the Tungusic tribes including the Ewenki in much of the entire region except for the Lower Amur and northern Sakhalin. This interesting hypothesis is proposed based upon several observations detailed below.

The Nivkh live a sedentary lifestyle based on fishing, fishskin/dogskin clothing and dugout dwellings. Their villages usually of less than 20 families were set up at river mouths. And, before the Manchu influence of 1644 - 1911 AD, the Nivkh stay in wooden frame-supported mud huts over dugouts in the winter and in open dwellings covered with fish racks in the summer.

The Nivkh lived in exogamous clans under patriarchal rules after an earlier stage when they practiced group marriages in matriarchy. Nivkh religion was animistic, with all natural objects, the mountains, trees and rivers all being considered animate beings with sentient spirits. Bears were particularly revered as among the Ainu. The Nivkh cremate the dead and bury the ashes in the earth. Following the burial, the sled that carries the dead burned and the dogs that had dragged the sled killed and roasted. Surprisingly, the Nivkh religion and burial habits remind me of the northern Chinese, and Qiangic for that matter, traditions that can still be seen nowadays in the countrysides, hinting some sort of ties with the Nivkh.

The Nivkh preserve fish by drying it into Yukola and favor the most Talkk, salad made of fresh fish and wild garlic. The only demosticated animal is dog. The Lower Amur Nivkh and the Sakhalin Nivkh speak almost mutually unintelligible dialects.

The Ewenki tribes have partly adapted the Nivkh way of living. The Nivkh were tributary to the Manchu empire for many centuries . Since late 1800s, the Nivkh had gone directly from the stone age to the modern time.

3。 The Ket:

The Ket are previously called the Ostyak, derived from what the Turkic people call them. Sometimes, the northern Ket also come by their tribal name of Imbak, whilst the southern group Yugh or Yug--which had since been found to be very different from the Ket. Related but now extinct ethnic groups included the Arins, Assans, Baikots, Kotts and Pumpokols, which lived further upstream in relation to where the modern Ket (barely 1,100 of them) live, i.e., the eastern bank of the middle Yinesei River.

The Ket are interpreted to have been descended from an ancient people that may have been the earliest inhabitants of the central and southern Siberia. Recent DNA evidences link the Ket to the proto-Qiangic people of China and SE Asia, unique amongst all the Siberian ethnic groups. The Ket language is the most distinctive from all adjacent tongues. It is believed from linguistic hints that a proto-Yeniseian language existed well over 2000 years ago, which probably have been related to such distant languages such as Basque, Burushaskia, Northern Caucusus and proto-Qiangic (even as well as some Amerindian Na-Dene), all of these lumped into the linguistic superfamily Dene-Causasian. The proto-language Dene-Caucasian may have been spoken over 20,000 years ago by the neolithic hunters-gatherers who replaced the Neadertals in Europe and had inhabited much of Eurasia, and who had managed to survive waves of latecoming farmers and pastoral people.

The modern Ket are assumed to have emigrited from the Altai Mountains thousands of years ago. This migration is said to be recorded in the Ket legends. According to the legendary folklores, the Ket crossed a high mountains (the Sayan) and moved northward into the taiga to escape invading Tystad (meaning 'stone people'). There, the Ket were once again attacked around 900 AD (?) by the Kiliki (坚昆　or Kilghiz?) and fled farther north to avoid the steppe nomads. The Kilghiz attack seems to be in line with the Chinese written history, which describes the Kilghiz lived in the Upper Yenisei and the Altai, an area the Ket had lived. Maybe it is a bit far fetched, but the similar misery caused by the invading nomads as shared between the sedentary Chinese and Ket could possibly hint a distant link.

Who are the Tystad people? Some scholars proposed that they could be the Hun, an Indo-European(?)-ruled tribal confederation that consisted of (i) Turkic people (Turks, Kilghiz, and Uiguir) in the center, (ii) Uralic-Ugric (Magyar, Finn and Someyed) in the west, (iii) 丁零 (Uiguir) in the north, (iv) 乌恒Wuhuan-鲜卑 Xianbi in the east, (v) some northern Mongoloid stock in the south (南匈奴), and possibly (vi) some Ket holder-overs in the Altai.

From Tystad meaning 'stone man'. In Europe, Megaliths were widely erected in the neolothic age, whilst in the northern Xinjiang of present-day China erected stones or stone men are also observed widely. Whoever erected these stones could be the people that drove the Ket out of the area. One reasonable hypothesis is that these 'stone men' are the earliest Indo-European invaders from the East Europe.

In the Yeniseian river valley, the Ket admixed with and probably displaced the Eskimo-related Siberian aborigines. That "Yugh" is the Eskimo word for "human being" suggests that the Yugh are Keticized Eskimos. There are a number of Ket words that were borrowed from Eskimo tongues.

Most of the pre-Russian river names in the southern Siberia are of Ketic origin. The taiga Ket clothes (a type of loose-fitting robe or caftan that is not found elsewhere in the northern taiga) seem to have originated in a warmer climate in the south and later adapted to the bitter coldness in the north.

The Ket were fishers, hunters and gatherers prior to the 1600s Russian influence. Sharp wooden arrows that are poisened with rotten fish oil were used in hunting. Dogs were used in assistance during hunting. In the summer, they dug wild lily root on the river banks for food and went fishing using dugout canoes. The Ket are smart people; they learned reindeer breeding from their Samoyed neighbors as a secondary trade. The Ket built qus (a kind of tipis) with conical pole frames and felt or bark covering in the summer, and used banggus dugout made of earth and logs.

The Ket had a patriarchal society. The Imbat were initially subdivided into two exogamous phratries to exchange marriage partners. The bride's family received a price for loss of daughter to the bridemaid's family, a convention somewhat similar to the Proto-Qiangic peoples such as Qiang and Han.

The Ket revere the bear and folklore hero "Balna" (meaning cherry stick). Ket buried their dead in the earth, along with personal possessions that would be intentionally broken and sacrificed dogs that probably belonged to the dead.