Another report from the Estonian summit

 A 400-year-old discovery of a man's remains in the northeast Finland (Koillismaa, Kuusamo) suggests connections to the Arctic Ocean region. The grave contained a witch's drum hammer, so it is credibly assumed that the man in the grave was a Sámi shaman. It remains unclear whether the man originally belonged to the Sámi people of the Finnish region, because the White Sea had centuries-old connections to the Bothnian Bay (Perämeri) and thus also to Koillismaa, where the grave discovery was made. In the past the population moved more locally than today.

Saint Henrik's origin revealed?

Geneticist Elina Salmela reveals secrets related to the origin of the late medieval Finnish ecclesiastical relic. This interesting case is also related to one of Finland's oldest church legends. According to the story, a Finnish peasant, named lately Lalli, killed a crusader bishop with an ax on the winter ice of lake Köyliö in the Southwestern Finland. As a result of the event, Finland's first ecclesiastical saint, Saint Henrik, was born. Salmela opened up about Henrik's possible origins at a meeting held in Tartu, Estonia, on September 13-16.  Today the meeting has been held and the presentation video can be available somewhere.

New article summerizes Finnish studies

 The auctor is a known Finnish geneticist and the article header is "where did the Finnish genome come from".  It is in Finnish, so it is not useful to undergo the text, instead of it I try to analyse pictures in general level.  The summary follows subjects of Finnish genetic research and gives a good picture about the situation we have now.  There are some old standpoints or approaches which I'll list first.   I try to evaluate these things and list obvious problems in Finnish studies. 

1 Strong connection between language and genes

I understand that the pressure on this point of view is strong, because Finno-Ugric people are a small minority in Eurasia.  This has been obvious.  Has this matter been too strong and impeded the research?

2 The viewpoint about the unique Finnish genome

Usually this idea is explained by the isolated geographic situation of Finland.  Actually Finland has been widely open to the east, in a comparable amount to Estonia and other Baltic countries, yet western cultural connections have been strong.

3 After that (unique Finnish genome) a bit strangely Finnish studies underline the diversity of Finnish uniparental genetic lines.

A big dilemma has been why the mitochodrial dna shows high diversity in Finland.  I havn't seen explanations;  sometimes it is explained by western connections, sometimes by eastern connections.  Also, the yDna shows both western and eastern origins.  IMO the research has not even tried to find explanations.

4 Explaining differences of domestic genetic diversity by historic events instead of prehistoric events.  In Finland the historic time starts after the 12th century.  The Finns are seen as a unique population with unique root.  But one of the most popular idea in Finnish research have been to underline the historic era east-west bifurcation of the Finnish population, based on the PEACE TREATY OF OREKHOVETS (TREATY OF NÖTEBORG, Pähkinäsaaren rauha in Finnish) in 1323.  This sounds weird, because this border was valid only a bit more than 200 years and even the most pheripheral regions of the eastern side were returned to the Finnish speaking entity only 300 years later, in the beginning of the 17th century.  How can the difference have been resulted in 200-300 years?  Mostly the explanation has been the Karelian influence in the eastern Finland, but Karelian language has never been spoken in Finland to a larger extent.

The introduction in this summary challenges old standpoints to some extent.   I translated introduction and core observations, but if you are more interested in latest reckonings I recommend to translate the text.  

Here is the link to the article.

Google translation.

Introduction

In medical genetics studies, the Finnish population is used as an isolate and homogeneous.  Neither is exactly true. Modern and ancient DNA studies have shown, that people have come here with their genes from different directions throughout the millennia. So we're on inherits mostly from the west, but about a dozen also from the far east; that's how it got from post-glacial hunter-gatherers, early potters, early farmers like bronze from Siberia as well. The genetic peculiarity of Finns is that in Finland small population and recent bottlenecks have resulted in genetic drift that is swayed the frequencies of many genetic forms to the rest of Europe in general. Also within Finland there is a strong genetic dividing line between western and eastern - or southwestern and northeastern between Finland.

Core observations

Ancient DNA studies have shown that new inhabitants have come to the surrounding areas of Finland through prehistory.
The majority of what modern Finns inherit is of western origin.
Speakers of Finland's eastern relative languages with we only have a common genetic heritage a few percent.
Eastern and Western Finns differ genetically distinct from each other more than many Central European populations.
The East-West difference and its genetic distinctiveness is largely due to the population boom periods in history from the bottle necks and the small population.

Picture 1 presents now available ancient samples.  Unfortunately southwestern Finnish autosomal samples described in my previous post are not yet available and present in this paper.  Those samples are first autosomal samples representing prehistoric Finnish people.

Picture 2 presents a PCA plot showing certain selected samples.  Unfortunately the plot lack of western (Scandinavia, Gotland, Poland) and eastern (Russia) Iron Age samples.  Only Estonian and Finnish Iron Age samples are included and the Finnish ones actually represent Saami people.  

(I noticed that the close-up is not analogous to the wide picture)

Picture 3.  Used methods are not specified. Results differ somewhat from the admixture analysis of Tambets 2018, but the difference is not in any way essential.

Picture 5 shows the west-east dichotomy in Finland.  I have not seen explanations why this happens.  What is the historical reason to this dichotomy?  Obviously it can't be a short-term peace treaty between Sweden and Novgorodian Russia.  It is said that the dichotomy is a result of the Karelian origin of East Finns, but what I have seen the suggested Karelian source population came from the Karelian Isthmus and they resemble today more Southwest Finns than Eeast Finns.  Misunderstanding is caused by the academic Karelian sample set got from Russia, which is from the White Sea region rather than from Karelian Isthmus.

A new Finnish Master's Thesis sheds light on Late Iron Age burials in Southwestern Finland

 The name on thesis is "THE GENETIC MAKEUP AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION IN EARLY MEDIEVAL COASTAL SOUTHWEST FINLAND", the author Nelli-Johanna Saari.  It is available from the library of the University of Helsinki.  I do not quote it because it is limited by copyright laws, but you can order it by email, the Openness Act gives you right to get it.

The main discourse of the thesis is related with archaeological finds. It is good work as far as I can understand, keeping in mind that I have not got acquainted with archaeology more than reading some books published for laymen.  The text was interesting.

Coming to the part dealing genetics I can say more.  This section is rather brief, but earns to be noticed because this is the first one giving something of the thema  i.e. Late Iron Age Finnish genetics (in Finland the Iron Age ended 1200AD!  and historic time from that onwards).

The thesis includes two PCA plots.  These plots prove only that already 1000 years ago the Finns were Finns.  Only addition that can be said is that they might have carried less Saami or Siberian admixture than Finns today, but too few Saami samples on the plot didn't reveal the possibility of Saami admixture in Iron Age samples.  It is also possible that some samples represent Iron Age outliers, samples seen outliers from the present-day perspective.

The admixture analysis shows same tendencies than PCA plots.

The f3-analysis uses homozygous western hunter-gatheters as an ancestral source, which can lead to erroneous conclusions, because thousands years old ancestry comes through a complex history from different eras and directions.

Downloads missed

 Some downloads in my old posts are not available any more, because my telecom provider ended the home page service.  I have backups, but the work would be enormous to update all links in old post.

Finnish I-clade, the origin and age

All this text is copy-pasted from my publications in other medias.

I try to collect data of the Finnish clade and the tree associating with it. I made interesting observations and add more pictures on following days. The first one shows the root from CTS2208. The clade age is 3900 years.

Some points. A 1000 years old ancient sample is from Novgorod Russia. It is likely Swedish or Finnish. Surprising Turkish group has TMRCA 500 years and two samples are from Antalya.

German samples are from Lower Saxony.

The next downstream level is CTS7676, formed 2800 years ago and recent TMRCA 2300 years. It has two branches, the first one, I-Y142754, fully Swedish, but not old. Oldest samples have TMRCA 950 years, most samples only 550 years. Actually this is a tiny local group in Dalecarlia, which is a bit like Swedish backwoods. Hold your breath, tomorrow I show how the oldest branch of CTS7676 continues 

Next clades are of Finnish origin. There are in Yfull around 200 Finnish samples and among them 20 Swedish, Russian and Norwegian samples, all except the higlighted sample in areas where the Finns have migrated during the Swedish era. It is not rational to make screenshots of them all, because alll are publicly available in Yfull.

The top level clade is L287, clade age 2300 years. Below it is two clades, a small By594 (1950 years) and L258 (1950 years). By594 includes two samples, a Finnish one and Norwegian in Troms. Troms is in Northern Norway where Karelians and legendary Kwens (or Kvens, mentioned in several old texts like Egils saga) used to make raids in the Middle Age.

The main Finnish clade is L258 (1950 years). Its origin is in Southwest Finland. The Finnish archealogist Unto Salo, owning the best education in the southwestern prehistory, have shown the demographic continuum from the first centuries AD in the geographic region where the density of present-day Finnish I1 is highest.

Sorry for a long text. The clade age are calculated using available samples, but they don't cover throughout the history, because in all possible scenarios we have lost ydna lines due to lines dying out. This had biggest effect in small ancient populations, although it happens all the time. We can only say that geographical male lines were born latest in the calculated clade age, meaning that the first Finnish I1 man was born beween years 2800-2300 ybp. If so it means that the population that brought I1 to Finland was in Finland 800 years before the estimated arrival of the Finnic language and was likely here also before people who brought the Saami language. Genes challenges the old history writing and it takes time to linguists and historians to change the course, still keeping them respected. Sad but true.

Holy Grail of the Uralic languages, the origin in Siberia

 It has gone a couple of years since a new Siberian-like Bronze Age sample was found from Central Siberian Krasnoyarsk.  Almost every blogger being interested in population genetics started soon to speculate if this Bronze Age man belonged to the first speakers of Uralic languages and the reason was, actually two reasons, Siberian origin and that the man belonged to the male haplogroup N.  In my opinion this conclusion was debatable.  Definitely he belonged to purest North Siberians, among many other Siberian people.  Definitely the yDna haplogoup N is common among modern Uralic speakers, but N is common also in other language groups.  Genes don't have language, languages don't have genes.  This poor Bronze Age man will never reveal his language.  Only thing common with his genes and the origin of Uralic languages is Siberia. Can we say that only one language was spoken in an area extending thousands kilometers to every direction, that this man and his kinship kept connection by  yoiking over hundreds kilometers?  Languages need common society and culture to strenghten enough to make further expansions.  One man has one male haplogroup, but he needs society and common culture within a larger social context to be able to advance something.  In the other hand even his genes were not unique in Siberia.

To have something real in my hands I made tests, a PCA-plot and a series of qp3Pop analyses.  On the PCA there was nothing particular to mention; the Krasnoyarsk man was on two first dimensions pretty much like many other pure Siberians.  Making Eurogenes G25-style multifimensional analysis would be great, maybe Eurogenes want to do it.  But then the f3-analysis revealed something.  I made two analyses comparing almost all populations I found in the North Siberia-Europe  cline to Nganasans and to the Krasnoyarsk man.  Finally I divided the Krasnoyarsk result by the Nganasan result to get the ratio of all population in the cline.  The ratio revealed that despite of  small Siberian admixture some populations had a high Krasnoyarsk ratio, including Finns.  May this mean that those with high ratio formed at least partially the westward migration of Uralic speakers?

 

2 - North Siberia - Europe cline

3 - North Siberians
 

 

Green color - high Krasnoyarsk_BA ratio.