11 Facts About Koreans

Koreans are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Korean Peninsula.

South Koreans refer to themselves as Hanguk-in or Hanguk-saram, both of which mean "people of the Han".

Ethnic Koreans living in Russia and Central Asia refer to themselves as Koryo-saram, alluding to Goryeo, a Korean dynasty spanning from 918 to 1392.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Proto-Koreans were migrants from Manchuria during the Bronze Age.

Whitman suggests that the Proto-Koreans arrived in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula at around 300 BCE and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators .

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However, haplogroups are not a reliable indicator of an individual's overall ancestry; Koreans are more similar to one another in regard to their autosomes than they are similar to members of other ethnic groups.

Ancient genome comparisons revealed that the genetic makeup of Koreans can be best described as an admixture of the Neolithic Devil's Gate genome in the Amur region in the Russian Far-East adjacent to North Korea as well as that of rice-farming agriculturalists from the Yangtze river valley, which in turn are often linked to O2-M122.

Koreans show a close genetic relationship with other modern East Asians such as the Han Chinese and Yamato Japanese and with Neolithic specimens recovered from Chertovy Vorota Cave in Primorsky Krai, who themselves are the closest genetic relatives to the Udege and the Hezhen.

Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, Eugene Y Park said that many Koreans seem to have a genealogical memory blackout before the twentieth century.

Koreans gave an example of what "inventing tradition" was like from his own family's genealogy where a document from 1873 recorded three children in a particular family and a later 1920 document recorded an extra son in that same family.

Only a small percentage of Koreans had surnames and ancestral seats to begin with, and that the rest of the Korean population had adopted these surname and ancestral seat identities within the last two to three hundred years.