Indigenous European Hunter-gatherer origin of Finns

I have been busy for a while with this blog, but after this writing I am going to start a new project and stay away from here for two weeks in preparing new data.

It has been some discussion about the origin of Finnish people.   Did they come from north, east, south or west?   But absolutely not from above or below.  An estimate given by Haak et al. 2015 gives us the origin of Finns: 25% early Neolithic farmers (compared to Norwegians with 48% early Neolithic farmers), 10% Siberians (compared to Norwegian 4%), 8% western hunter-gatherers (Norwegian 0%) and  50% Yamnaya (Norwegian 48%).  Because the Yamnaya settlement was already mixed holding eastern, western and southern roots we can assume that this kind of mixture existing in Finland is not necessarily just from a Yamnaya migration.  To check it we can compare Finnish genome data to eastern and western hunter-gatherers.  If the western proportion is bigger than eastern then the Finnish admixture turns out to be more western, no matter how similar it is to the Yamnaya composition.  Here is the result from Haak et al. 2015

 



















We see that the Finns have exceeding western hunter-gatherer admixture over the Yamnaya composition found from Norway, but we don't know how big the western proportion is, because we don't know exactly the Yamnaya composition.  So we can test it regarding Finns using one million SNP's now publicly available.

 

The result shows without doubt that the Finns are closer Loschour (WHG) than Karelian HG.  It shows just the same for Samara hunter-gatherers;   the Finns are much closer WHG than Samara.  And again, the same happens with western Motala_HG, both Eastern hunter-garherer groups are more distant. But a surprise comes from Hungary.  Hungarian hunter-gatherers beat also western hunter-gatherers being the closest group for Finns.