What is the DNA of the indegenous Saami people?

[noUseForAname]

It is Argued that Saami people are indigenous in Europe. It would be interesting to know their DNA...

 

[Aberdeen]

It is Argued that Saami people are indigenous in Europe. It would be interesting to know their DNA...

There are already threads on this forum that discuss this subject, if you look for them. I think the general consensus is that the Sami are a mixture of pre-Neolithic western European and Uralic DNA.

The most common mtDNA haplotypes are U5b, V and Z. The Sami and the Berbers share U5b1b, which is about 9,000 years old, so many people assume it survived the last glacial maximum in the assumed Franco-Catabrian refugium before spreading from there. V was previously believed to be from the same source, but I think now more people believe it's an eastern European haplotype. And Z is apparently rare outside the Sami, and mostly found further east. The most common Y haplotypes are N1c, I1 and R1a. I1 is apparently a fairly recent haplotype but would be descended from I*, which appears to have been ancient in Europe, surviving the last glacial maximum in some refugium, although people have different ideas about which one would be more likely. N1C and R1a are from eastern Europe and probably arrived after I1. So the Sami don't seem to have the Neolithic farmer strain that most modern Europeans have. They seem to consist mostly of older European heritages (Y haplotype I1 and mtDNA U5b) mixed with Uralic and Indo-European ancestry that arrived there from Russia.

Since the Sami speak a Uralic language, it's not surprising that the largest Y haplotype is N1c. Although modern Russians speak an Indo-European language, the ancestor of which probably arrived in the northern half of Russia from further south with R1a, there seems to be a lot of Uralic influence in the Russian language and culture, and N1c is a common haplotype there, so probably the Uralic language was spoken by N1c types in Russia before it arrived in Scandinavia.

 

[Beavrrit]

Very good question. My family came from Finland, and they always seemed not originally "Scandinavians", although they may have been there earlier and spread through a wider third of Europe much further south. As the Uralic traces in Russian are found also in Baltic and linguists noticed it in other Indoeuropean proto-languages much East to India, deducting from it that it must have been "in touch" and maybe genetically interbreeding with the earliest proto-Indoeuropean itself and its speakers. A further question would be, if considering R1a's or N1c's as V or Z came from the Southeast with the Indoeuropeans and Uralics during the Neolithic or about, who were those who developed the late Paleolithic/Mesolithic Cultures seen over a wider area of the Baltic almost 'til the Rhin delta (and Ireland/Scotland...pre-Picts?)? Were the Saami already in place with the I and U people as the Ur-Scandinavians? To what degree all Scandinavians may have Saami ancestry, however diluded? And if the I1 came only late in the area..... which other Ydna haplotypes may have been in Scandinavia from the Ice Age refugees they came from? Assuming there was a surviving variety in Western-Central Europe as the Ice receded North

 

[Naomi]

What is the DNA of the indegenous Saami people

Are either of your that familiar with Mexican Y-dna studies were you can point me to a study from some time ago...maybe 6-8 years that was unusually high in E-m35/M78 lineages?

 

[RobertColumbia]

Are either of your that familiar with Mexican Y-dna studies were you can point me to a study from some time ago...maybe 6-8 years that was unusually high in E-m35/M78 lineages?

I think this question is a bit off topic for this thread, which was about Sami DNA, whose y-haplotypes consist primarily of N1c, I1, and R1a.

 

[arvistro]

Earliest y-dna found in region is Mesolithic r1a in Karelia.