Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia
Genetic truth is stranger than fiction: nth reboot
This generation of human paleogenomics has been delivering a steady stream of grand revelations about our species’ origins and evolution, from the reality (and indeed ubiquity) of Neanderthal ancestry that hitchhiked into the present aboard our own genomes, to the discovery of a whole new human species, the Denisovans. Lately, geneticists have moved on to open questions of more recent vintage, shifting from the domains of paleoanthropology and archaeology to recorded history’s very threshold. With the vast volume of ancient human DNA samples now accumulating, massive swaths of Eurasian humanity can be examined along a transect tracing genetic change across tens of thousands of years. Like a waterlogged landscape after an epochal flood finally recedes, our age’s surfeit of data is exposing surprising phenomena that had long lain indiscernible or even wholly unimagined.
Unexpected finds in paleogenomics are driving us to consider startling questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask. Dynamics like a demographic turnover here, or the migration of an unknown people there, force us to reshuffle known archaeological results and theories into new configurations. A 2023 preprint out of David Reich’s lab seems to have come close to pinpointing the origin of the Baltic’s Finnic peoples, while a 2025 preprint from his rival Eske Willerslev’s group may have uncovered the proto-Germanic tribes’ ancestral homeland in the most unexpected locale. Because whereas the Finnic tribes’ destination was the eastern Baltic, that same zone now appears to have been the proto-Germanics’ and their ancestors’ long mysterious origination point. In a general sense, the Finns’ and Estonians’, and their proto-Uralic ancestors’ more than 1,000-year journey from one end of Eurasia to the other is little surprise, just a refinement whose precise details linguists, archaeologists and now geneticists had long quested to pin down. But the very suggestion that what became Finland and Estonia were meanwhile the mysterious homeland of the earliest proto-Germanic-speaking people comes straight out of left field. Disciplines like archaeology have barely had time to come to grips with the ramifications of this possibility, with early scholarly response thus far amounting to little more than stunned silence.
Out of Yakutia
It’s never been any secret that the eastern Baltic’s Finnic-speaking peoples are something of a different stripe of European; not least of their differences is their non-Indo-European languages, which are likely of Asiatic provenance. Nevermind their predominantly Nordic features, in the early 20th century, these linguistic affinities meant racially fixated European anthropologists regarded them with some suspicion; atlases of the period would often classify Finns as a partially Asian ethnicity. On linguistic grounds, this was not without foundation; save for Hungarian and Estonian, Finnish was the westernmost branch of the Uralic language family, whose domains blanketed Nordic Europe’s northernmost reaches, and then stretched over and across the Urals toward central Siberia’s Arctic shores, where scattered bands of hunter-gatherer Samoyeds spoke the family’s easternmost dialects. The central question, though, for early scholars was about direction: did the Asian Samoyeds pick up their language from European Finns who had strayed east, or did the Finns’ language actually descend from that of Siberian interlopers? Were the Finnic peoples Europeanized Asiatics, or were the Samoyed tribes Asianized Europeans who had intruded into Siberia and been swallowed into the peoples of our vastest continent?
As this young century dawned and the Human Genome Project finished its first draft, geneticists began developing new methods to assess and classify populations. First up, phylogenetic techniques developed earlier on small datasets of medical and evolutionary relevance were redeployed to generate family trees of uniparental lineages utilizing the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Unlike the vast bulk of the genome, these segments of DNA pass purely from father to son (the Y) and mother to daughter (the mtDNA, because while sons indeed inherit their mother’s mtDNA, they pass it no further), yielding tree-shaped genealogies, with branches bifurcating and diversifying over time from common ancestors. Because populations variably undergo periods of rapid growth or collapse, and geographic separation results in distinct breeding populations, the Y and mtDNA patterns in haplotypes track demographic history. These unique genetic signatures can be combined into broader related clusters or haplogroups, to define population-wide lineages.
Using these methods, combining the new genomics and older phylogenetic frameworks, geneticists detected patterns that showed all non-African humans today were broadly related to each other, and that haplogroups tended to exhibit geographic patterns that map satisfyingly onto what anthropology and archaeology had taught. Interestingly, while Finnic mtDNA did not differ from that of their Scandinavian neighbors to the west, Finnic Y chromosomes were markedly distinct. About 60% of Finnish men carried haplogroup N, as compared to 7% of Swedish males, 3% of Norwegian men and 1% of male Danes (while N is basically wholly absent from Western and Southern Europe). Interestingly, haplogroup N, and Finland’s particular sublineage, is also found in populations to the east, from European Russia all the way out to Siberia’s Pacific coast. In Russia’s frigid far north, half of men carry this lineage, while among the Finnic-speaking ethnicities of the Russian Urals, the Udmurts and Mari, its frequency hovers around 30-50%. Among the Samoyed tribes, over 50% of men carry N. Finally, among the northeasternmost Turkic-speaking people in the world: the Yakuts of eastern Siberia, 80-95% of men are N. Though haplogroup N’s ambit is more extensive than the map of Uralic languages today, save for Hungarians, all Uralic-speaking populations harbor N in high numbers. If you are a man who carries N, you may not be Uralic, but if you are a (non-Hungarian) Uralic male, odds are good that you carry N.
But this still didn’t settle the question of directionality, west to east, or east to west? The highest ratios of N were at the two geographic antipodes of its distribution, in Finland and Yakutia, though curiously the Yakuts are Turkic-speaking and so Altaic rather than Uralic. Inspecting the genetic diversity within Uralic branches of N found more variation in the east than the west, and as a rule, more variation usually correlates with a lineage’s deeper history in a region, but correlation does not always tell the whole story. Sometimes greater or lesser genetic diversity just reflects peculiarities of population history, like admixture between ethnicities long separated, as in the New World.
After 2005, genetic tools to extend beyond the narrow purview of sex-based haplogroups began to come online. Geneticists could analyze whole genomes from numerous populations, seeking patterns and informative clusterings among datasets of thousands of individuals across thousands of markers. A 2018 paper focused on Uralic populations found that a particular genetic cluster within the admixture plot often correlated with populations who speak Uralic languages. But overall, this genetic cluster’s highest frequencies appeared among Central Siberians and Arctic populations, in particular Samoyed tribes like the Nenets. Meanwhile, among Europeans, this cluster appeared almost exclusively in Finnic-speakers (or those admixed with Finnic-speakers, like Swedes, Latvians and Lithuanians) and Russians (many northern Russians between the Baltic and the Urals have Finnic ethnic ancestry). This component happens to be maximized among the Samoyed tribes, as is the exclusive contributor to the ~5% East-Asian ancestry observed among Finns today. Though the Finnic-speaking people of the eastern Baltic are overwhelmingly European, they do all exhibit this common Siberian ancestry, whereas Samoyed people from Central Siberian seem to entirely lack European ancestry (at least save for very recent scattered Russian admixture). This makes it much more likely that the Finns derive ancestry from Siberia, albeit diluted, than that the Samoyeds descend from a Finnic people with Baltic origins.
Because northern Eurasian conditions are highly conducive to ancient DNA preservation, paleogeneticists have been able to probe population-genetic diversity across numerous archaeological periods, going far beyond comparisons of modern populations. Early ancient DNA samples from the eastern Baltic show a range of peoples, but the arrival of Siberian heritage and haplogroup N seems to postdate 1000 BC, at least in the coastal regions modern Finns and Estonians inhabit. The Reich lab’s 2023 preprint, Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages, marshals a massive number of samples across five millennia to definitively conclude when and where the Uralic people originated.