Monday, February 08, 2021

Lapplanders are not indigenous to the Scandinavian High Arctic

If you read Wikipedia, it will tell you that the Lapplanders, or Sami is it is now more politically correct to call them, are the indigenous peoples of northern Fennoscandia. They are recognized and protected by "international conventions of indigenous peoples", whatever exactly that means. However, the arrival of the Uralic languages to the Fennoscandian region is now pretty well documented thanks to archaeogenetic research, and it is highly correlated with the N1 Y-DNA haplogroups, more specifically N-L1026. This appears to have originated far to the east, in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, and the earliest arrivals of it to the Fennoscandia region include sample 0LS10, from a tarand grave in what is now Estonia from the Iron Age, and possibly two samples from the Bolshoi Oleni Ostrov culture in stone cist or ship graves of the Middle Bronze Age far to the north of the Kola Peninsula. The last two are a bit intriguing, because they predate what most everyone in the field suggests was possible for the dating of the Uralic spread. But from a genetic perspective, they seem to be everything that one would want from Uralic ancestors of the Lapplanders. Except, of course, they aren't indigenous. They are, in fact, considerably later arrivals than the Nordic Bronze Age, which is considered directly ancestral to the modern Swedish-Danish-Norwegian etc. population. And the Nordic Bronze Age is directly descended from the Corded Ware variant, the Battle Age culture, mediated by incursions from the Bell Beakers. This goes back a good thousand years before the arrival of anyone who could be considered an ancestor of the Lapplanders. The Indo-European, "Viking" Scandinavians have about a thousand year jump on the Lapplanders with a claim to be "indigengous." Of course, there were people there before the arrival of the Corded Ware. Some Neolithic farmers like the Funnelbeakers had expanded over the southern extent of this region, including the Danish peninsula and the southern shores of the Baltic.

If anyone has a claim of being the indigenous peoples of Fennoscandia, it's the hunter-gatherer traditions of the Ertebølle-Ellerbek culture, the Narva culture, and the last lingering hunter-gatherer culture which coexisted with both Funnelbeakers and Corded Ware, the Pit-Comb Ware culture. In the past, that was assumed to have been associated with Uralic speakers, but that view is untenable given what we now know about Uralic from a linguistic and genetic perspective. Most likely, they belonged to Scandinavian hunter-gatherer groups that are linguistically and culturally gone now; some kind of paleo-European language that has been replaced by the descendants of Corded Ware or Finnic languages, or Baltic and Slavic languages in some places. Genetically they didn't really disappear, they simply merged with the Nordic Bronze Age, and even today hunter-gatherer haplogroups like I2 which go back to old Ertebølle genetics, like those unearthed at Motala, are still common in Scandinavia. And from there, you can find clues of continuity all the way back to the peopling of the region in the Upper Paleolithic after the retreat of the glaciers.

Now, to be fair, the Lapplander and Finnic peoples may be among the latest arrivals (not counting the Middle easterners who have come in just the last generation or two) rather than the indigenous ones, but from a genetic perspective, none of them are exactly "pure" Uralic. The phenotype and genetic profile of these early Uralic speakers would have greatly resembled the Nganasan peoples of a bit further east on the Taymyr Peninsula today. But because Finns and Lapplanders both have tons of "Viking" DNA from the descendants of the Corded Ware Pit-Comb Ware hybrid that made up the Nordic Bronze Age, they seem very similar to them in both genetics and phenotype today; speaking simply a completely unrelated language, having some unusual customs, and having lingering unusual haplogroups. As well as very occasionally some exotic physical features like modest epicanthic folding and whatnot. But even in the Bronze, Iron and Medieval era DNA studies, you can see this shift happening, as the late arriving "Uralic" DNA was gradually swamped by the actual indigenous people who lived here already; the descendents of the Corded Ware and Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers who make up the populations of the Baltic and Scandinavian cultures today.

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