Nomads to natives: how Bronze-Age Sami newcomers became eternally Nordic
A circum-polar toolkit, a Uralic tongue and hybrid genetics set the Sami apart
The European Union recognizes exactly one European people as indigenous: the Sami, hardy inhabitants of Norway, Sweden and Finland’s northern reaches. These northernmost Europeans are the picture of culturally unique: nomadic reindeer herders who speak Finno-Ugric languages very different even from the Finnish, to whose speakers they are related (you may recall Finnish speakers call their nation Suomi, the term Finland (like Lapland) is just an exonym care of their Swedish neighbors). The Sami were Europe’s last pagan people. Forcibly converted to Lutheranism only in the 1700’s, their shamanic practices left them open to accusations of blasphemy which occasionally ended with them being burned at the stake.
Today, about 100,000 Sami remain, half in Norway (mostly in the northern region of Finnmark), the next largest group in Sweden, then about 10,000 in Finland, with finally a small residual in Russia and scattered across the global diaspora (the actress Renee Zellweger has a Norwegian, partially Sami, mother). Though now largely restricted to the Arctic regions of the Nordic nations, historically the Sami were present much further south. Their status as indigenous peoples plainly rests on their statelessness, marginality, and a historical record which attests that settlers of ethnic Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish heritage pressed them ever further northward over the last millennium, in step with the emergence and consolidation of the modern nation-state. Stateless and marginalized for certain, but are the Sami indigenous under any meaningful definition of the term? Are they even Europe’s most indigenous people?
Well, it’s complicated. They are and they aren’t. And that stark divide between some of Europe’s genuinely most indigenous, rooted ancestry and some of its most recent, barely prehistoric genetic inputs runs a variegated course through nearly every Sami genome. Sami average some 60% deeply indigenous European heritage and some 40% genuinely exotic ancestry inputs from interlopers who reached Europe’s most remote corner just some three millennia ago, a hybrid of Siberians and the remote foragers who ranged between the Baltic and the Urals.
To pick apart the recipe of this distinctive heritage, let’s start by rewinding beyond the past millennium of the Sami’s undisputed marginalization. The combined evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and now genetics concurs that the Sami presence as we know it today in Scandinavia and Finland was not primal. The first people of the domains they now inhabit bore no cultural resemblance to today’s natives. The people we know as Sami, culturally and linguistically, would only arise around 3,000 years ago. Upon arrival, the largely Siberian men assimilated local women from Europe’s northernmost indigenous hunter-gatherer populations, the resulting hybrid people eventually expanding inexorably southward, displacing the Germanic-speaking ancestors of Norwegians and Swedes as they went.
Today’s Sami, Finnic-speakers whose native cultural toolkit remains firmly Uralic, are not some window onto Nordic Europe’s deep indigenous past. If anything, the Sami culturally, and in large part genetically, are arrivistes. The most interesting twist in their story might actually be an almost exact inversion of the EU party line; Sami interlopers helped themselves to Europe’s most unforgiving territories, being uniquely empowered to strip those domains from their previous inhabitants, given their uncannily apt cultural toolkit honed thousands of miles away in another inhospitable stretch of Arctic Eurasia. That culture left them so ecologically well equipped to thrive in Europe’s northernmost climes that modern Europeans have a hard time imagining they were not always there. Perhaps we can see a small parallel in the alacrity with which plains tribes wholesale adopted horse culture upon the animal’s arrival in North America. Anything but culturally indigenous, the Sami have thrived in their adopted homeland because they happen to have arrived there perfectly provisioned for such conditions.
Europe’s Siberians
Just on a superficial level, many Sami have a vaguely Asiatic mien. Today, drawing on advances in the field of ancient DNA, genetics has established the indisputable reality of their Siberian connections. A 2018 paper, Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe, probes the roots of the Finnic peoples in the context of contemporary and ancient European genetic variation. In addition to contemporary populations, this paper compared several prehistoric and historic samples. Three individuals above, whose identifying labels begin with “JK,” are from Levänluhta near Vaasa on Finland’s west coast, far south of the modern Sami homeland of Lapland that hugs the shores of the Arctic. Though the regions are firmly Finnish-speaking today, toponymic clues across central and even southern Finland indicate the earlier presence of Sami speakers. The three Levänluhta individuals’ archaeological context dates to the first millennium, between 300 and 800 AD. The other two batches of samples, with codes starting “CHV” and “BO”, are from northwest Russia’s Kola peninsula, hard upon the shores of the Arctic. The two “CHV” samples were retrieved from a 19th-century Sami burial ground, while the six that begin “BO” date to 1500 BC and hail from Bolshoy Oleni island, another Arctic site whose name translates as Great Reindeer Island, and which was clearly another locale hospitable to Sami forebears.
The remaining samples, a mix of contemporary and ancient, span most of Europe. Here, as Lazaridis et. al. demonstrated in 2014, we see that most European populations can be well modeled with variable ratios of three ancestral population streams. First, an ancestral component associated with the European foragers who expanded across the continent after the end of the last Ice Age 11,700 years ago. Second, another from Anatolian farmers who brought agriculture to the continent from the southeast, 9,000 years ago. And finally, the last element via Indo-European-speaking pastoralists from the Pontic steppe who arrived beginning 5,000 years ago. Like many peoples, the Indo-Europeans were in turn themselves a recent mix, with Caucasus-sourced southern heritage melded to another stream from points east via Paleo-Siberians who had mixed with European foragers.
The admixture plot, which breaks down individual genomes into distinct ancestral components, largely tracks this model. Green correlates with steppe ancestry, and is absent in both non-Indo-European speaking Basques and in the only recently linguistically Indo-Europeanized Sardinians. Blue appears in steppe people, but is also associated with Western European hunter-gatherers, and appears at somewhat higher levels in Northern than Southern Europeans. Finally, the orange correlates with Neolithic farmers, and here Southern Europeans have more than Northern populations.
But neither Finnic peoples nor Russians are exhaustively explained by this three-population model. They require an additional appreciable (purple) component maximized in the Nganasan tribe of Samoyeds who range over the Taymyr peninsula, a Norway-sized central Siberian region nearly 3000 km distant as the crow flies (a 9000-km trip by land today) that gives onto the Arctic ocean. A trace yellow component maximized among Native Americans also appears in some Sami samples, as well as in the Bolshoy Oleni individuals, and even among earlier foragers from northeastern Europe, like those of the Comb Ceramic Culture that dominated Finland and northern Russia before 2000 BC.
The Sami connection (and that of their more southerly Finnic relations) with far-off Nganasans is not surprising, because linguistically all speak Uralic languages. But why do so many Russians share this heritage? Simply because before 1000 AD, Finnic-speaking tribes dominated the whole zone between the Baltic and the Urals, haunting the vast boreal forests that stretched south from the Arctic; these people would mostly be linguistically and culturally Russified in subsequent centuries. Scratch enough Russians and find a bit of Finn?
The 2018 paper from which the figure above is adapted focused on their results’ temporal aspect: the Bolshoy Oleni individuals show that discernible Siberian ancestry was present within Europe’s northeastern edge as early as 1500 BC. Later work indicates that this Siberian heritage derives from an expansion with an original locus in far eastern Siberia, along the shores of the Lena river in Yakutia. Siberian foragers’ adoption of metal-working 4,000 years ago accelerated their expansion westward, all the way to the shores of the Baltic. Significant circumstantial evidence points to Finnic-speakers having roots among the Seima-Turbino culture of the central Urals which extended east and west along a broad band between 2200 and 1900 BC.
