Customs Shared by the Native Peoples of the Americas and East Asia

A small number of European historians insisted with all their might, until a few years ago, that the native cultures of the Americas came over from Europe. Around 2010, as human genetic genealogy revealed that the bloodline of East Asians is the bloodline of the native peoples of the Americas, they have now fallen silent. The relationship between East Asian culture and the cultures of the native peoples of the Americas seems to span a connection of 40,000 years.

Seeing that Maya glyphs, like Chinese characters, show meaning as single words, sit inside squares, and are read left to right or top to bottom, I imagined that they might be related to the matrix from which Chinese characters came, before the characters were standardized in the Han dynasty BC. They differ from the oracle-bone script of the Shang dynasty, but I saw a commonality in that they are made up of dots and straight lines combined — the way numbers were marked in the Zhou dynasty's Book of Changes, and the basic components of Hangul. Since then, over the past thirty-some years, I have visited the national museums of various countries and the cultural sites of the Olmec, Teotihuacan, Aztec, Maya and others across Central America's Yucatán Peninsula. While reading many books, watching video materials and attending scholarly meetings, I found the following things in common between East Asian culture and the native cultures of the Americas.

(1) The culture of raising mounds, thousands of which were built around the Great Lakes of North America and in the Mississippi basin, is of a piece with the mound culture of the southern Korean Peninsula and China's east coast. The mounds were made by digging reservoirs the village needed and heaping up the earth into small hills, which became altars for sacrificing to heaven or the tombs of village nobles. Most of the reservoirs have vanished, but the hill-shaped mounds can still be seen if one looks closely. Hundreds of mounds are scattered across the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, and the tombs of Baekje and Silla also belong to these customs.

(2) The stepped pyramids distributed along the Pacific coast of South America are of the same style as the thousands of stone-mound tombs around Jilin Province in Manchuria and the outskirts of Xi'an, and there is a process by which the triangular pyramid appears. The arch of Maya stone architecture is the same style as the stepped roof (corbel arch) seen in Goguryeo tombs. The high staircases on Maya stone pyramids that seem to connect heaven and earth resemble the ancient East Asian religious architecture that remains at the entrances of Chinese temples and in Japanese Shinto shrines. The staircases of our Bulguksa Temple and the miniature staircases on the Dabotap Pagoda show the same meaning. The stone pyramid of El Tajín on the Yucatán Peninsula recalls, in scale and shape, the stone pagoda at the Baekje Mireuksa Temple site.

(3) The form of the dragon built into the ruins of Teotihuacan in Mexico, where the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon were raised, is the same as the form of the East Asian dragon, only its body is made of bird feathers instead of fish scales. At Chichén Itzá on the Yucatán Peninsula one also sees the form of a dragon coiling around a pillar. The dragon's face, the demon mask (귀면), is the face seen on the roof tiles of Baekje and Silla architecture on the Korean Peninsula, and is commonly seen in the carvings of Shang dynasty bronzes. The demon mask with an elephant's trunk carved on Ming dynasty incense burners can easily be seen on the facades of Maya buildings.

(4) The long jade-stone blade on the spear tips used by the native peoples throughout North America to hunt large game is called the Clovis spear point. Such a widely used tool was produced unchanged for tens of thousands of years. It is a tool attached to spear tips for hunting large game throughout Northeast Asia, including around Lake Baikal in Siberia, and seems to have been passed on to North America as a weapon used by Neolithic primitive people. The half-moon-shaped stone knife with a handle resembles a fan and is called a fan knife. It is a knife for slicing meat, seen throughout Asia and also throughout North and South America. The iron fan knife is still used in modern life, including by the Eskimos of Siberia and Alaska.

(5) They have the religious concepts of yin and yang and the concept of the Five Elements, use two calendars like the lunar and solar calendars, and just as East Asia has the twelve earthly branches and the 60-year cycle, they have 13-year and 52-year cycles. Offering human beings as sacrifices existed for a long time in ancient East Asian history. The site plan (伽藍 layout) of their temples — oriented on a north-south axis, with the pyramid at the center and gates on four sides — resembles the layout of East Asian palaces and temples. Going to war, building beacon towers on high places, lighting fires and sending black smoke into the sky as signals, and beating drums to send signals far with sound, are also phenomena seen in common in East Asia.

(6) Covering the face of the officiant with a mask at festivals corresponds to the custom of the gwangdae [masked performers] in Korea. In Mexico there are the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, and the five animals symbolizing the Five Elements are represented as the serpent, eagle, jaguar, crocodile, toad and so on, a phenomenon corresponding to the Five-Element symbols commonly seen in Korea's Goguryeo culture — the Blue Dragon, Vermilion Bird, White Tiger, Black Tortoise, Yellow [center] and so on. There are many four-syllable names like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Minnehaha; Korean history had many four-syllable names like Eulji Mundeok, Yeon Gaesomun and Bak Hyeokgeose, similar to the habit of four-character phrases in Chinese writing, and the Japanese all use four-syllable personal names. The lower garment of the Maya is the same as the Japanese loincloth (fundoshi).

(7) The ancient Chinese made jade into round coin shapes with a round hole in the middle and wore them on the body as ornaments, calling them taotie, and said they warded off evil spirits. Taotie are commonly seen in the dress and ornaments of Maya nobles. The bodies of Shang and Buyeo kings were covered, body and face, with pieces of jade. The bodies of Maya kings were covered, body and face, with pieces of jade. According to Buyeo funeral customs, it is said that when a Buyeo king died, a suit of jade armor, the okgap, was to be placed among the grave goods.

(8) Among the human-figure sculptures in the National Museum of Mexico there are sculptures in the posture of the acrobatics that Chinese people often perform on stage. It was displayed that Ming dynasty porcelain had been traded. Among North American native peoples one can see the custom of decorating the hair with Chinese coins. On the Korean Peninsula, jangseung [guardian posts] were carved on tall poles and set at the village entrance, and in many places including Alaska in North America one sees many totem poles carved with birds and people and raised high. In the speech of Canadian Indians, much that feels like our language still appears today. Farming words like "sal (ssal)" [rice], "irang" [furrow ridge], "gorang" [furrow], "homi" [hoe] and "jaenggi" [plow] are almost the same as our words.

(9) Using millstones and mortars to grind grain and a winnowing basket (ki) to toss the husks to the wind is the same as the customs of life on the Korean Peninsula; they also thresh with a flail (dorikkae) and use a foot-operated treadmill (didilbangah), and they dry hemp to wear collared jackets, and the looms for making cloth are similar too. In the customs of the Central American region, people raise and eat dogs, chickens and pigs. Just as we enjoy food with hot red pepper powder, they enjoy hot Tabasco. They smoke tobacco with long pipes and love to play the flute. One commonly sees sculptures that give the impression of wearing hats, similar to the dol hareubang of Jeju Island in Korea.

(10) East Asia's navigational compass, the oldest in the world, was also used in the Peruvian culture of South America, and the East Asian custom of tying knots in cords to keep records can be seen here too. In a scene where a grandmother of the Inca Empire was interviewed, to the question "What do you call a woman who has not married?" she answered "chenye," so it seems there may be many commonalities, like the Korean word "cheonyeo" [maiden].

(11) In the East Asian region and on the Korean Peninsula there was a custom of head-flattening, deforming a baby's head to make it flat. That custom may have had the result of producing today's descendants with flat faces and flat backs of the head. One can see in museum exhibits that the head-flattening custom also existed in Central America. As seen in our country's old customs, there is a custom of decorating lavishly with bird feathers and wearing brightly colored clothes. As recorded in Korea's Samguk Sagi, ball-kicking was played at the royal court, and in Central America, too, the ball game was the most important of the court events.

In the history of human distribution, the East Asian peoples settled along the East Asian coast around 50,000 years ago and then split into two paths: the inland peoples who migrated into Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Eastern Europe, and the native peoples of North and South America who migrated along the coastlines of Siberia and Alaska into North and South America. They were the great artery of the oldest human bloodline in the world.

If East Asian culture and the culture of the native peoples of the Americas could be this close, we can easily imagine that East Asian culture and Mediterranean culture, too, were linked in many aspects of culture and civilization through tens of thousands of years of land routes, sea routes and Silk Road connections. The connection between Asia and the Central American continent faced climatic obstacles in winter, but the connection between Asia and the Mediterranean was far easier.

If we look at climate change on Earth over the past 100,000 years, a hot climate like today's continued from 100,000 to 80,000 years ago; then from 70,000 years ago the Earth's temperature grew colder, and an ice age began in the European continent, the northwestern part of the Asian continent and the North American continent. While the ice age continued from then until 12,000 years ago, the sea level was some 100 to 300 meters lower, so today's island nations of Southeast Asia (Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines) were part of the Asian continent. In particular, between Indonesia and the Philippines there was a landmass as large as India (Sundaland). Great hopes are placed on future undersea exploration for the remains of ancient East Asian culture hidden in the continent that now lies beneath the sea. In the process of this continent sinking into the sea, its culture fled east to Polynesia, and some of them, following the equatorial ocean currents, seem to have arrived in South America, beginning the Olmec culture, and later the sea route by which East Asians reached South America was pioneered. The Olmec culture is an unprecedented high culture that began in South America and appeared in Central America, and the faces of the Olmec people, with large lips, large eyes and broad noses, are Polynesian in appearance and closely resemble the native Hawaiians.

Of the peoples from Southeast Asia, those who settled in India are the Dravidians, and those who moved north along the coastline are the Neolithic people who settled on China's east coast and the Korean Peninsula, and who, I believe, later settled in Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet and founded nomadic states. The humans who entered the European continent from Africa before 70,000 years ago could not survive once the ice age began; but the people who, after adapting to climate change in Southeast Asia, settled in Southwest Asia and then migrated along the coastlines to settle in Europe, grew accustomed to a long winter life, their black hair turned blond, their eyes blue, and their white skin weak against the sun's heat and ultraviolet rays, and from 9,000 years ago, after the thaw, they came into contact with Asian culture.