About the Tujia people origin

This study considers the problem of the origin of one of the largest ethnic groups - Tujia, now living mainly in southern China. The ethnonym “Tujia” is a Chinese translation of the ethnic self-name, which means “local inhabitant”, “aboriginal”. Tujia were not local always. Their ancestors came to the southern regions from the north, like the other Tibeto-Burman peoples. It was a multi-stepped process. Primarily the di-chian tribes migrated to the territory of Sichuan and established a state formation Ba in concert with Austric people. This state was the basis of Tujia formation. Paleogenetic data and some observations on contemporary ethnography of Tujia evidence it. Thus, the ancient Austric Asian people firstly constructed the palafittes where Tujia live, and then Tibetans adapted them to life in the mountains. The same situation is in the case of predilection of all the Tibetan people to tea chowder, hot and hearty drink meal. Some of the food taboo, especially pork, associate with nomadic type of Tujia economy. Mostly northern characteristics in the Tujia genetic code combine with predominantly southern, that indicates the complex, composite character of this ethnic group and its culture, respectively. A comparison of the predominantly northern characteristics in the Tibetan people genome with the similar structures of Kazakhs and Mongolians permits to consider the Tujia ethnogenesis in the context of the broader problem - the interaction between ancestors of Tibeto-Burman and Turkic-Mongolian peoples.