Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages.

The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages-that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic-is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history1-3. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements4,5. Here we address this question by 'triangulating' genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic-Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional 'pastoralist hypothesis'6-8, we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture.

Hereditary and histologic characteristics of the CF1/b cac mouse cataract model.

A substrain of mice originating from the CF1 strain (an outbred colony) reared at Osaka Prefecture University (CF1/b cac mice) develops cataracts beginning at 14 d old. Affected mice were fully viable and fertile and had developed cataracts by 22 d of age. The incidence of cataracts did not differ between male and female mice. Histologically, 14-wk-old CF1/b cac mice showed vacuolated lens epithelial cells, swollen lens fibers, many pyknotic nuclei, and vacuolation of the lens cortex. To elucidate the mode of inheritance, we analyzed heterozygous mutants hybrids generated from CF1/b cac and wildtype BALB/c mice and the offspring of the backcrossed heterozygous mutants. None of the heterozygous mutants was affected, but the ratio of affected to unaffected mice was 1:3 among the offspring of the heterozygous mutants. The initial genomewide screen of 20 affected backcrossed offspring (CF1/b cac × [CF1/b cac × BALB/c]) indicated that the mutant gene resides on chromosome 16. For further mapping, we used affected progeny of CF1/b cac × (CF1/b cac × MSM/Ms) mice. We concluded that the cataracts in CF1/b cac mice are inherited through an autosomal recessive mutation and that the mutant gene is located on mouse chromosome 16 between D16Mit5 and D16Mit92 and between D16Mit92 and D16Mit201. The mapping of the mutant gene of the CF1/b cac mice to mouse chromosome 16 provides the positional information necessary to identify the candidate gene responsible for the CF1/b cac phenotype.