Sami Genetics: Distinct

Finns and Laplanders speak related languages distinct from Indo-European. Linguists have naturally supposed that both the Finns and the Sami hail from that region between the Ural Mountains and the Volga River which is the believed place of origin for the Finno-Ugric language family. But recent genetic studies suggest otherwise. Finns, it seems, are more closely related to the Germans, English and Italians than to the Sami, and thus they probably came to Finland from the south, not the east.

Molecular geneticists Antti Sajantila of the University of Helsinki and Svante Paabo of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich found that Finns were more likely to share identical "micro-satellites" - receptive DNA sequences - with other Europeans than with the Sami. Meanwhile, more than one third of the Sami in the study group carried three specific genetic "motifs" that were found in only one in fifty Finns and in none of the other Europeans studied.

Sajantila believes that Finns colonized the land from the south some 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, adopting a proto-Sami tongue in the process. He points out that the Finns may not always have been in the majority.

"We know from history that the Finns have been pushing the Sami northward," says Sajantila. "So it seems that the Finns were more powerful. But if it's true that the Finns have changed their language and obtained it from the Sami, it shows that the power game was not necessarily so simple or that the Sami were always the underdogs.
Leceister Science Review

United

The Sami mitochondrial gene pool differs substantially from that of other populations studied. In contrast, other European populations, including Finno-Ugric speaking groups other than the Sami, Indo-European speaking groups, and the Basques, show no major characteristics that are not also found in the other populations. The data thus argue that the Sami have a history distinct from that of other groups in Europe.

The Sami speak several mutually nonintelligible languages and have different current subsistence patterns. They are thus linguistically and culturally diverse, and it may be asked to what extent the mitochondrial gene pool is homogeneous among Sami. As shown above, two mitochondrial lineages, common among Sami but rare or absent elsewhere in Europe, exist in all Sami groups studied. Furthermore, the mean pairwise difference among mitochondrial sequences in the Sami groups (with the exception of the Inari Lake Sami) varies between 3,08 and 3.19 whereas that between other European groups varies between 3.49 and 4.72. Thus the Sami not only have a history distinct from that of other Europeans but share this history among themselves.

The time depth that a particular genetic lineage reflects will be determined by its evolutionary rate. For the mitochondrial region studied here, estimates of the evolutionary rate vary between approximately one substitution in 13,000 years to one substitution in 5,000 years. Thus the temporal perspective in which the distinct history of the Sami and the shared history of other populations in Europe has to be seen is on the order of tens of thousands of years.

Studies of the nuclear genes in the Finnish population suggest that Finns have gone through a substantial bottleneck in size. This is indicated by <30 recessive autosomal diseases that have high carrier frequencies in Finns but are almost absent in other populations including, as far as we know, the Sami. Conversely, some common recessive diseases that have high carrier frequencies in other European populations, such as cystic fibrosis and phylketonura, are virtually absent in the Finns. Furthermore in phylogenetic trees based on protein and blood group analysis, Finns appear as outliers. In stark contrast, when mitochondrial linkages are analyzed, the number of shared lineages between the Finns and Indo-European speakers is high, and the distance between the groups no greater than between other European populations, although the frequencies of particular lineages may vary in the populations. Thus the analysis of mitochondrial lineages may reflect the affiliation of the Finnish population to other European populations prior to the founder effects that caused gene frequencies to change.

The unique position of the Sami on the genetic landscape of Europe could mean that they are an old population in Europe which diverged from other European populations prior to subsequent linguistic and cultural diversification. Alternatively, they may have come to Europe from another, currently unknown region. The latter possibility does not, however, get support from the survey of human populations that has so far failed to identify the mitochondrial lineages typical of Sami at any appreciable frequencies in other populations. However further sampling, particularly of Asian populations, is necessary to clarify this.

........from Genes and Languages in Europe: An Analysis of Mitochondrial Lineages, Sajantila, Lahermo, Anttinen, Luuka, Sistonen, Savontaus, Aula, Beckman, Tranebjaer, Gedde-Dahl, Issel-Tarver, DiRienzo, Pääbo, reprinted from "Genome Research," 1995, and anthologized in "Samerna-en gentiskt unik urbefolkning: fyra decennier gentiska studier av svenska samer-från blodgrupper til mitokondriellt DNA" (The Sami-a unique indigenous population: four decades of genetic studies of Swedish Sami - from blood types to mitochondrial DNA) Lars Beckman, Umeå University, 1996.

Indigenous

Sami and Australian Indigenous People - Aboriginals, maintain their virility longer than men from other ethnic groups. The reason is probably that even though these groups live very far away from each other, they have a very similar lifestyle. According to the Stockholm newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. A Finnish research team from the University of Åbo found a special hormone among male Sami. This hormone, called LH, is active until the male is way up in years, and the same hormone is found among Australian Aboriginals.