The shape of the Oracle bone script character for "person" may have influenced that for "harvest" (which later came to mean "year").  Today, they are pronounced rén and nián in Mandarin, but their hypothesized pronunciations in Old Chinese were very similar, which may explain the resemblance.  For example, in the recent Baxter-Sagart reconstruction,[7] they were /niŋ/ and /nˤiŋ/, respectively, becoming /nʲin/ and /nin/ in Early Middle Chinese.