I found the part about the cows especially interesting...
http://www.archaeology.org/9609/abstracts/dna.html
Given the traditional conflicts between the Japanese and Korean People, I also found this interesting.Nonhuman DNA has great potential for shedding light on cultural practices. Recent work by Daniel Bradley is a case in point. Before now it was assumed that cattle were first domesticated in the Near East. African, European, and Indian cattle were all thought to be descended from a domesticated Near Eastern progenitor, and to have developed into characteristic breeds afterward. Bradley and his colleagues have determined that Indian cattle broke off from an ancestral lineage between 117,000 and 275,000 years ago. The lineage split again about 22,000 to 26,000 years ago into groups that gave rise to modern African and European cattle. These are startling results because cattle in the Near East were not domesticated until about 9,000 years ago, and cattle in India and Africa were genetically distinct before then. The latter two could not possibly be descended from domesticated Near Eastern cattle, as was thought, but must have been domesticated independently.
I grew up in a time and place where Japanese/Korean relations were very strained.Most scholars believe that people from the Asian continent came to the Japanese archipelago in two migrations. An early wave brought the Jomon culture--hunter-gatherers who made pottery--to Japan more than 10,000 years ago. A second migration began about 2,300 years ago, when the Yayoi people, entering from the Korean Peninsula, brought weaving, metalworking, and rice culture to Japan. First appearing on the southwestern island of Kyushu, by ca. A.D. 300 Yayoi culture had spread throughout most of Japan, altering all local cultures south of Hokkaido, the northernmost island. Michael F. Hammer and Satoshi Horai are examining the extent to which the Jomon did or did not contribute genetically to the modern Japanese. Current hypotheses can be classified as replacement, hybridization, or transformation. In the first, Yayoi immigrants replaced the Jomon people. Hybridization theories claim that modern Japanese are descended from both groups, in which case they should have genes deriving from both the Jomon and Yayoi people. Transformation theories posit that modern Japanese people gradually evolved from the Jomon. Hammer and Horai, based on their study of the Y chromosome, conclude that hybridization, a mixing of Jomon and Yayoi stocks, is the most likely explanation for the origin of modern Japanese.
