Old Novgorod

 According to Russian historical books, Novgorod was a multinational trading place, whose administration represented an early form of democracy. The city's nationalities also include Finns and Karelians, who are originally from Finnish tribes.

The graphic I have made now indeed shows that Finnish roots can still be found 554 years after the city lost its independence. Moscow conquered the city in 1471. Finnish heritage today is of course not even close to what it was at the time of Novgorod's greatness.

It must be considered that the current PCA only covers the relationships between the peoples represented in it. For example, Siberian heritage is therefore ignored, as are Caucasian and southern influences. Scandinavia and the Baltic have been taken into account. Of course, a two-dimensional presentation with the two most significant PCA dimensions does not cover all similarities, but based on the image it is clear that in Novgorod, Finnishness is clearly stronger than Scandinavianness.

This result raises questions among both Finns and Russians. Politics aside, I fully understand the problems with genetics-based demography because of its possible new interpretations. However, we must ask what is a new interpretation of things and whether a new interpretation of history is always progressive. These things need to be examined openly, both in terms of the data and the results obtained.

Mordovians lean towards eastern Finno-Ugric people, which are not included in this picture.

The Kursk sample is an outlier, drifting another one a bit to the same direction.

New article sheds light on the Scandinavian Iron Age

 Here is an interesting article (-> link )  that definitely requires more in-depth study. The migration history of the Scandinavian Iron Age has been divided into three phases using a new (?) arithmetic. In the first phase, in the Middle Roman Iron Age, we see migrations from northern Germany and Scandinavia to Central Europe. In the second phase, covering the later Roman Iron Age, the Migration Period and the Merovingian period, we see migrations from the south (it will say from Central Europe) into Scandinavia. This migration would explain two key observations: 1) Anglo-Saxon finds deep in the Swedish Great Lakes region, suggesting even more southern cultural influences, and 2) the shift of the genetic makeup of modern Scandinavians to a more southern location compared to earlier Scandinavian genome samples. In the third phase, during the Viking Age, the expansion of Scandinavian trade and military expeditions to all directions.

My task is to search the Middle Roman Age samples used in the study and place them in a Fennoscandinavian context.