Sunday, November 3, 2019
Thoughts about the origin of Finnish and Estonian languages
This is probably not a popular writing, but I am not a politician and I don't need to please anyone. Here is the issue: why the yDna distribution among ancestors of the earliest Finnic people doesn't correspond to their imagined yDna? Linguists are cosily unanimous that the home of Baltic Finnic languages was in Southern Estonia around 3000 years ago. One but not the only reason for this has been the presence of Baltic loan words in Baltic Finnic languages, including Finnish. Numerous studies endorse this idea. Baltic loan words wouldn't have been possible without straight connection with Baltic speakers. But then, why this theory is not supported by genetics? It is a common idea that the haplogroup N1c1 brought Finnic languages from the east to Estonia. However, only a small minority of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age men in Estonia carried N1c1 and even less of them carried those clades nowadays especially connected to Baltic Finnic speakers. Below statistics from Saag et al. 2019. 21 samples of all 28 ancient Estonians carried R1a and only 6 belonged to N1c1, one was J2b2. Furthermore only one of those six belonged to a "Finnish haplotype" and other five most likely belonged to "Baltic haplotypes".
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Any ideas and suggestions connecting this or that haplogroup to a specific language and it's movements that far back in time in this part of Northern Europe must be more or less educated guesses based on insufficient evidence, both genetic and other. This goes also for the people (and their haplogroups) that possibly brought Proto-Finnic to Finland. As far as I know, even this is a commonly accepted view, not least due to the massive lack of relevant ancient DNA samples from Finland that could be compared with the nearby areas, especially south of the Gulf of Finland. The number of samples from Estonia fitting the time frame of the currently most compelling linguistic ideas about the spread of Proto-Finnic and Uralic languages in the vicinity of the Gulf of Finland is actually not that big either.
ReplyDeleteNamely and firstly, according to the views and ideas presented by Petri Kallio in "The Diversification of Proto-Finnic" (2014)
- the diversification of Proto-Finnic started first in the middle of the second century AD (and thus the dispersal of the Proto-Finnic speakers logically a bit earlier than that);
- before the diversification, the Finnic speakers were probably concentrated on the coastal areas on both sides of the Gulf of Finland where they had been present (at least to some extent) from the Pre-Roman Iron Age (c. 500–1 BC) onwards.
(This differs somewhat from the view presented by Valter Lang and Karl Pajusalu, 2015-2017, on the more southern migration route of the Baltic-Finnic speakers, see e.g. "Läänemeresoome tulemised".)
Secondly and in accordance with Kallio (and others) above, also Saag et al. (2019) (see Summary) only hints about the language shift in the area of Estoniain connection to gene flow to the area: "This [Siberian type of] ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BC; i.e., in the same time window as the diversification of west Uralic (Finnic) languages."
When we now take a look at the ancient Estonian samples in Saag et al. (2019) from that time period (Early Estonian Iron Age, and only males for the sake of the Y DNA haplogroups) there are only some six such samples from the period roughly between 790 and 40 BC, half of them already belonging to hg. N, half to hg. R.
I don't know, many things mismatch, including Baltic expansion of VL29 and other clans and also the expansion route of later and supposed Finnic Tarand graves. Also the origin of Siberian admixture in Estonia is still questionable, because there was such a high level as 30% as close as in Finland. The puzzle of the route of Finnic origin in Estonia still remains without reasonable explanation. It is of course proven that N1c1 became common in the Roman Iron Age Baltic and Fennoscandinavian region
DeleteJust to clarify. What, in your opinion, is the major mismatch concerning the "tarand" graves − the much older "tarand" type of graves in Uppland in eastern central Sweden? By the way, OLS10 and V10, too, are from "tarand" graves (Hiiemägi at Kunda in Lääne-Virumaa). Saag et al. (2019) report that according to the isotopic analysis neither of them was locally born. In the case of OLS10 and according to isotopic comparisons "his place of birth is still unknown (but south-western Finland and Sweden are excluded)" (e7).
DeleteLater during the Iron Age, the cremations became more common making the investigation of aDNA difficult. Hopefully, more information can be gathered later for comparisons to help to map the migrations of different subclades of hg. N (and others). As stated earlier, this goes very much so also for Finland. Now, much of the data needed is just missing.
According to some scientific sources Tarand grave culture came to Estonia from northeast (later graves) where Ingria is. It looks like combining Finnic cultural and linguistic paradigms with Baltic and Estonian N1c1 is still difficult. I don't oppose it, I only see too little sense. That is all.
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