Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology

Highly speculative, but I found this of interest:

This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited and maintained extensive psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral Ancient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic Northeast Eurasia around the Last Glacial Maximum period of the Late Pleistocene, prior to back migrating southwards into East Asia in the Holocene. I present the first cross-psychology comparison between modern East Asian and Inuit populations, using the latter as a model for paleolithic Arctic populations. The comparison reveals that both East Asians and the Inuit exhibit notably high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion and subdomain unassertiveness, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/endurance. The same traits have been identified by decades of research in polar psychology (i.e., psychological research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel living and working in the Arctic and Antarctic) as being adaptive for, or byproducts of, life in polar environments. I interpret this as indirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits in modern East Asian and Inuit populations primarily represent adaptations to arctic climates, specifically for the adaptive challenges of highly interdependent survival in an extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and isolated environment, with frequent prolonged close-quarters group confinement, and exacerbated consequences for social devaluation/exclusion/expulsion. The article concludes with a reexamination of previous theories on the roots of East Asian psychology, mainly that of rice farming and Confucianism, in the light of my Arcticism theory.

Here is the full paper by David Sun.  Here is David’s related Substack.