The Ainu have often been considered to descend from the Jōmon-jin people, who lived in Japan from the Jōmon period.

While modern Ainu have predominantly tested as being mongoloid ( due to heavy race mixing ), The race to which the Ainu belonged cannot be determined until ancient remains are tested.

Recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture originated in a merger of the Okhotsk culture with the Satsumon, one of the ancient archaeological cultures that are considered to have derived from the Jōmon period cultures of the Japanese Archipelago.

Full-blooded Ainu are lighter skinned than their Japanese neighbors and have more body hair.

However, Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex said Kanzō Umehara considered the Ainu and some Ryukyuans to have " preserved their proto-Mongoloid traits " According to anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons physical features of the Proto-Mongoloid were characterized as, " a straight-haired type, medium in complexion, jaw protrusion, nose-breadth, and inclining probably to round-headedness ".

Ainu men have heavy beards

Ainu men have abundant, wavy hair and often have long beards.

In the book of " Ainu life and legends " by author Kyōsuke Kindaichi ( published by the Japanese Tourist Board in 1942 ) contains the physical description of Ainu: Many have wavy hair, but some straight black hair.

( 2004 ), two out of a sample of sixteen ( or 12. 5 %) Ainu men have been found to belong to Haplogroup C3, which is the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup among the indigenous populations of the Russian Far East and Mongolia.

( 2006 ) have tested a sample of four Ainu men and have found that one of them belongs to haplogroup C3.

Some researchers have speculated that this minority of Haplogroup C3 carriers among the Ainu may reflect a certain degree of unidirectional genetic influence from the Nivkhs, a traditionally nomadic people of northern Sakhalin and the adjacent mainland, with whom the Ainu have long-standing cultural interactions.

Although there have been attempts to show that the Ainu language and the Japanese language are related, modern scholars have rejected that the relationship goes beyond contact, such as the mutual borrowing of words between Japanese and Ainu.

A common ancestor of Japanese and Ryukyuan languages or dialects is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from either continental Asia or nearby Pacific islands ( or both ) sometime in the early-to mid-2nd century BC ( the Yayoi period ), replacing the language ( s ) of the original Jōmon inhabitants, including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language.

Japanese society, with its ideology of homogeneity, has traditionally rejected any need to recognize ethnic differences in Japan, even as such claims have been rejected by such ethnic minorities as the Ainu and Ryukyuan people.

Anthropologist Arnold Henry Savage Landor described the Ainu as having deep-set eyes and an eye shape typical of Europeans, with a large and prominent browridge, large ears, hairy and prone to baldness, slightly flattened hook nose with large and broad nostrils, prominent cheek bones, large mouth and thick lips and a long region from nose to mouth and small chin region.

Its name is derived from the Ainu language, from “ broad island ” or “ populous island ”.

As a result, large number of Ainu changed their surnames to Slavic ones.

Ainu population decreased drastically in the 19th century, due in large part

They are made with large glass beads the Ainu obtained through trading with Chinese merchants.

This has led to an increasing number of second-language learners, especially in Hokkaidō, in large part due to the pioneering efforts of the late Ainu folklorist, activist and former Diet member Shigeru Kayano, himself a native speaker.

By and large, they are seen as indigenous to Japan and not simply as ancestors to the Ainu, but descendants of the Jōmon.

Hakodate was founded in 1454, when Kono Kaganokami Masamichi constructed a large manor house in the Ainu fishing village of Usukeshi ( the word for bay in Ainu ).

Haboro may have originated with the Ainu language word hapuru, meaning " a soft sound ", or haporopetsu, meaning " the basin of a large river ".

In Ainu language, poro means large and nup mean grassland, thus meaning a large uncultivated land.

A penal colony was established on Sakhalin between 1857 and 1906, bringing large numbers of Russian criminals and political exiles, including Lev Sternberg, an important early ethnographer on Oroks and the island's other indigenous people, the Nivkhs and Ainu.

Its name is derived from the Ainu language for " large village ".

Although the increased contact brought by trade between the Japanese and the Ainu contributed to increased mutual understanding, sometimes it led to conflict, occasionally intensifying into violent Ainu revolts, of which the most important was Shakushain's Revolt ( 1669 – 1672 ).

While at the time the process was openly referred to as colonization (" takushoku " 拓殖 ), the notion was later reframed by Japanese elites to the currently common usage " kaitaku "( 開拓 ), which instead conveys a sense of opening up or reclamation of the Ainu lands.

Their most widely known ethnonym is derived from the word ainu, which means " human " ( particularly as opposed to kamui, divine beings ), basically neither ethnicity nor the name of a race, in the Hokkaidō dialects of the Ainu language ; Emishi ( Ebisu ) and Ezo ( Yezo ) ( both ) are Japanese terms, which are believed to derive from another word for " human ", which otherwise survived in Sakhalin Ainu as enciw or enju.

As of 2012, both the Kurile Ainu and Kurile Kamchadal ethnic groups lack the fishing and hunting rights which the Russian government grants to the indigenous tribal communities of the far north.

To eradicate the Ainu identity, the Soviet authorities removed the ethnic group from the list of nationalities which could be mentioned in a Soviet passport.

They settled down near Kurile Lake, which was inhabited by the Kamchatka Ainu and North Kuril Ainu.

In 1979, the USSR removed the term " Ainu " from the list of living ethnic groups of Russia, an act by which the government proclaimed that the Ainu as an ethnic group was extinct in its territory.

It differs by including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu ( which the Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families ) and in excluding Afroasiatic.

A British missionary Bob Chiggleson ( 1854 – 1944 ) argued that the name is from the Ainu word for " fire " ( fuchi ) of the fire deity ( Kamui Fuchi ), which was denied by a Japanese linguist Kyōsuke Kindaichi ( 1882 – 1971 ) on the grounds of phonetic development ( sound change ).

Its Japanese name,, supposedly comes from Ainu kamuy kar put ya mosir (, shortened to Karput ), which means " Land / Island / Country at the Shore of the God-Made ( River ) Mouth / Confluence.

Nobuhiro's descendants became the rulers of the Matsumae-han, which was granted exclusive trading rights with the Ainu in the Azuchi-Momoyama and Edo periods ( 1568 – 1868 ).

Historically, many peoples who had interactions with the ancestors of the Ainu called them and their islands Kuyi, Kuye, Qoy, or some similar name, which may have some connection to the early modern form Kai.

The Kai element also strongly resembles the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters ( Sino-Japanese, Japanese kun ' yomi ), which have been used for over a thousand years in China and Japan as the standard orthographic form to be used when referring to Ainu and related peoples ; it is possible that Matsuura's Kai was actually an alteration, influenced by the Sino-Japanese reading of Ka-i, of the Nivkh exonym for the Ainu, namely Qoy or.

The Momoyama family had come from Miyagi Prefecture, in the northeast of the main Japanese island of Honshu, where there are still traces of the mysterious Ainu strain.

As a result, many Ainu are indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, but some Ainu-Japanese are interested in traditional Ainu culture.

There are many small towns in the southeastern or Hidaka region where full-blooded Ainu may still be seen such as in Nibutani ( Ainu: Niputay ).

The North Kuril Ainu of Zaporozhye are currently the largest Ainu subgroup in Russia.

The Nakamura clan ( South Kuril Ainu on their paternal side ) are the smallest and numbers just 6 people residing in Petropavlovsk.

On Sakhalin island, there are a few dozen people who identify themselves as Sakhalin Ainu, but many more with partial Ainu ancestry do not acknowledge it.

It is believed that there are no remaining living descendants of the Kamchatka Ainu.

Ethnic Ainu living in Sakhalin Oblast and Khabarovsk Krai are not organized politically.

According to Alexei Nakamura, as of 2012, there are only 205 Ainu living in Russia ( up from just 12 people who self-identified as Ainu in 2008 ) and they along with the Kurile Kamchadals ( Itelmen of Kuril islands ) are fighting for official recognition.

Since the Ainu are not recognized in the official list of the peoples living in Russia, they are counted as people without nationality or as ethnic Russian or Kamchadal.