The Finns, the Saami and the Yakuts

[Jaska]

Their Y-DNA all has reasonably close matches with their Finnic and Scandinavian neighbors, so would have been recently introduced, (like with the language). I wouldn't place a bet on what the indigenous Y-DNA was 6000 years ago.

Like I said only ancient DNA can give us the answers we are seeking here. Y-DNA does seem to change more than mtDNA though among many populations as many migrations in the past were male biased or the communities practiced patrilocal marriage patterns where mtDNA haplogroups would then be widely dispersed and follow no real pattern.

True.

In the Saami there is this "indigenous" part, which would represent the earliest inhabitants of Lapland after the Ice Age (and the haplogroup of which we don't know), but there are many other parts from different directions; only one part is connected to the Saami language, and it also may have had many haplogroups as carriers, at least in the different waves of expansions:
1. From Volga bend to Upper Volga
2. From Upper Volga to the Ladoga area
3. From Ladoga area to Lapland

Because there were temporal gaps between these waves, the genetic composition may have been different in every stage.

[Linda Vixie]

I know I am abt 6% east Finnish, but mostly Norwegian. My Population Finder (PF) has surprising results. I am 97.8% western European ("Orcadian"), and 2.2% east Asian, most likely Yakutian (first mentioned people among them). . . . Are there any others out there with Finnish or Saami ancestry whose Population Finder shows Yakut ancestry?

Hi Erik--

I'm a new user of FTDNA and just got back my Population Finder results, which are very similar to yours:

Western European (Orcadian) 96.83%
East Asia (Yakut, Japanese, Mongolian) 3.17%
Margin of error: 0.37% on both

A quarter of my ancestry came from Denmark, a quarter from northern Germany, and a quarter from Finland, probably eastern Finland. The other quarter is a melange of several centuries in America, but known English, German, Dutch, Swiss, Scottish.

So yes, this result given my Finnish results is intriguing and your posts have helped me understand this.

I have 251 matches at FTDNA (only two suggested third cousins), and most of them have Finnish names. I think there must be a lot of Finnish participants in this database.

Have you found others with the Orcadian/Yakut profile?

Linda

[Tourist]

My Finnish mother-in-law once said that nobody knows just where the Finns originally came from, but Finland has made much research about that question, and apparently the Finns could have originated in the region of what is now called the Volga river, but long before any Russian ever set foot there, like several thousand years before any Russian ever set foot there.

That region is somewhat south of the region of where the Saami apparently originate, but it is known that both the Finnish and the Saami languages are related and are of the Uralic language family in origin.

The Saami are said to have migrated to what is now northwestern Russia and to what is now the Scandinavian peninsula at about the time of the end of the last Ice Age and that the Finns followed maybe a few thousand years later.

[perttuns]

Hi Erik--

I'm a new user of FTDNA and just got back my Population Finder results, which are very similar to yours:

Western European (Orcadian) 96.83%
East Asia (Yakut, Japanese, Mongolian) 3.17%
Margin of error: 0.37% on both
....

Have you found others with the Orcadian/Yakut profile?

Linda

I do not know of any with this profile.

However, some Northeastern Europeans have Yakut on their PF, at least some Finns have. Not many though. Most of them don't know of any Saame ancestors on historic times or before. What is defined as Yakut might be an old mix. Instead some that know that they have some Saame ancestors, don't have any Yakut percentages.

It would be interesting to know what the Gedmatch "says" about those that have Yakut in PF; if they have high or low Siberian and or Saame or other populations like that. Anyways, PF will have an update and maybe some will loose the Yakut percentages and it might be replaced by something more local and accurate. We'll see.

[sithia]

More Saami then you know

I know I am abt 6% east Finnish, but mostly Norwegian. My Population Finder (PF) has surprising results. I am 97.8% western European ("Orcadian"), and 2.2% east Asian, most likely Yakutian (first mentioned people among them). Jeroen R Huyghe et al. in their article A genome-wide analysis of population structure in the Finnish Saami with implications for genetic association studies in European Journal of Human Genetics (19, 2010, p. 347-352) found that the Saami are around 6% of east Asian ancestry, having an IBS (identity-by-state) sharing with the Yakuts of 0.7328. This could mean I have Saami ancestors, but that doesn't show in PF. My ancestors who could be of Saami descent lived in the territory of the so called Pite Saami, just south of Bodo, Nordland, Norway. I wonder why my Population Finder does not show my east Finnish or Saami ancestry. I have been told that there is no east Finnish reference group yet, but still. By the way I know that the population of Northern Savo in east Finland has a modest Saami component, perhaps about 6%. But could the Yakut ancestry have come through the east Finns and not the Saami? The graves on the island Olene Ostrov in Lake Onega, Karelia, Russia, contains some people with "Mongoloid" skulls. R. A. Denisova wrote that these skulls don't differ much from the Yakuts, except for the noses. (Erik Nilsson-Mankok (ed.): Etnogenesen av de finsk-ugriska folken, Umea, Sweden 1984, p. 22.) The answer could of course be a combination of all of these factors. Are there any others out there with Finnish or Saami ancestry whose Population Finder shows Yakut ancestry?

The black plague took out some 60 to 85 % of Norwegians. The Saami, which covers all of north and middle Norway, were not on the trade routs during that time and survived that illness. The Norwegians asked them to populate the abandoned farms down south and gave them full rights and as Norwegians. There is no records of them as Saami anywhere but I worked for the Norwegian American Chamber of commerce for years and happen to know that I was Saami before I was tested. Most of the genetic Norwegians are around Oslo. Southern Sea Saami are hard to distinguish from Norwegian both in appearance and in language so the ones that kept the original Saami family names sound close enough to Norwegian that you wouldn't know the dif. My Norwegian friends don't see me as Norwegian at all, even though my family comes from southern Norway.

[sithia]

More Saami then you know

I know I am abt 6% east Finnish, but mostly Norwegian. My Population Finder (PF) has surprising results. I am 97.8% western European ("Orcadian"), and 2.2% east Asian, most likely Yakutian (first mentioned people among them). Jeroen R Huyghe et al. in their article A genome-wide analysis of population structure in the Finnish Saami with implications for genetic association studies in European Journal of Human Genetics (19, 2010, p. 347-352) found that the Saami are around 6% of east Asian ancestry, having an IBS (identity-by-state) sharing with the Yakuts of 0.7328. This could mean I have Saami ancestors, but that doesn't show in PF. My ancestors who could be of Saami descent lived in the territory of the so called Pite Saami, just south of Bodo, Nordland, Norway. I wonder why my Population Finder does not show my east Finnish or Saami ancestry. I have been told that there is no east Finnish reference group yet, but still. By the way I know that the population of Northern Savo in east Finland has a modest Saami component, perhaps about 6%. But could the Yakut ancestry have come through the east Finns and not the Saami? The graves on the island Olene Ostrov in Lake Onega, Karelia, Russia, contains some people with "Mongoloid" skulls. R. A. Denisova wrote that these skulls don't differ much from the Yakuts, except for the noses. (Erik Nilsson-Mankok (ed.): Etnogenesen av de finsk-ugriska folken, Umea, Sweden 1984, p. 22.) The answer could of course be a combination of all of these factors. Are there any others out there with Finnish or Saami ancestry whose Population Finder shows Yakut ancestry?

The black plague took out some 60 to 85 % of Norwegians. The Saami, which covers all of north and middle Norway, were not on the trade routs during that time and survived that illness. The Norwegians asked them to populate the abandoned farms down south and gave them full rights and as Norwegians. There is no records of them as Saami anywhere but I worked for the Norwegian American Chamber of commerce for years and happen to know that I was Saami before I was tested. Most of the genetic Norwegians are around Oslo. Southern Sea Saami are hard to distinguish from Norwegian both in appearance and in language so the ones that kept the original Saami family names sound close enough to Norwegian that you wouldn't know the dif. My Norwegian friends don't see me as Norwegian at all, even though my family comes from southern Norway.
LOL, I just looked up Bodo on a map. Yes! your ancestors are totally Saami. At least no Norwegian would ever really see you as a Norwegian descendant rather one of Sapmi.

[loisrp]

How can one tell if one is of Saami ancestry, given known Norwegian genealogy?

[sithia]

How can one tell if one is of Saami ancestry, given known Norwegian genealogy?

Certain markers exist however its simple to look at your blood type. Saami have the arctic blood type A2+. Among genetic Norwegians you'll see more O+ and some A1+ blood.