Instead of rapid and large-scale population replacements, East Asian human populations show continuity dating back to 40,000 years, when the first modern humans are thought to arrive in the area. The people of Korea have been proposed to be the result of Bronze-Iron age admixture of two ethnic sources; North Asia and Southern China. Here, we suggest a high resolution hypothesis on the origin and migration of Koreans with eight Iron Age Korean genomes from Gimhae, a southeastern city in Korea. The studied individuals belong to the funerary complex of the Gaya confederacy kings that is the burial place of individuals belonging to different social classes. This newly generated ancient genome data has allowed us to detect the existence of population substructure in the Korean peninsula at the Iron Age from the comparisons against ancient and modern genomes in the region. Koreans are related closely to and probably migrated from Northern China. The ancient Korean genomes also show a variabl

Instead of rapid and large-scale population replacements, East Asian human populations show continuity dating back to 40,000 years, when the first modern humans are thought to arrive in the area. The people of Korea have been proposed to be the result of Bronze-Iron age admixture of two ethnic sources; North Asia and Southern China. Here, we suggest a high resolution hypothesis on the origin and migration of Koreans with eight Iron Age Korean genomes from Gimhae, a southeastern city in Korea. The studied individuals belong to the funerary complex of the Gaya confederacy kings that is the burial place of individuals belonging to different social classes. This newly generated ancient genome data has allowed us to detect the existence of population substructure in the Korean peninsula at the Iron Age from the comparisons against ancient and modern genomes in the region. Koreans are related closely to and probably migrated from Northern China. The ancient Korean genomes also show a variable presence of Japanese Jomon-related ancestry. The study of phenotypic SNPs from imputated genomic data also shows strong signals of population continuity as no relevant changes in allele frequencies are observed.