Motörhead Remember Me
01-19-2010, 10:27 AM
Spending a little time on Anthroboards such as Stirpes, Stormfront, Skadi, Biodiversity e.t.c and this one you’ll come across a lot of myths and strange ideas about about Finns. The “knowledge” is based upon the prejudism against Finns cemented by a much too romantic self perception and aggressive nationalism by neighbouring people, political motives and religious zealots of the 18th and 19th century.
The basic myths is that Baltic Finnish peoples and their distant linguistical relatives the Saamis are not really Europeans. Well, at least not as much as the rest of us. That they are part Asians or belonging to Mongoloid peoples. A religious German (Blumenbach) that lived 200 years ago liked to measure skulls and somehow managed to place Germans (surprise!) on top and Saamis (and as he saw it, their descendants the Finns) on bottom of his own European racial purity and beauty scale. The Saami people was an easy prey to classify on bottom as they were clinging on to the last nomadic hunter/fisher culture in Europe.
(For more on Blumenbach N. Painter Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race)
Blumenbach even managed to classify Baltic Finns as belonging to the Mongoloid peoples, without ever having seen a Finn, Estonian or a Saami.
And this is something that always pops up on anthropological discussion boards and sites dealing with European ethnicity, do Baltic Finns look Mongoloid?
Pseudoscience based on nonsense from more than 200 years back is still alive and kicking, but here your complete guide to busting the myths.
For a Skadi or a Stormfronter wanna be Viking member with imagined winged helmets it may be a bit of a scare to find out that Finland is the 8th most Germanic nation when it comes to genetics, and that the average Finn is probably more Germanic in looks than most friends of SNPA would ever dream of being. Nordic/Germanic traits a la Nazi ideology: "The "ideal" Aryan has high cheek bones, narrow faces, blue eyes and blond hair." Of all those traits which kind of “proves” one’s Nordic/Germanic ancestry, ethnic Finns sport all these traits as often as other Northern European peoples do.
Phenotype
Finns look different from Scandinavians and other Germanic peoples? http://dienekes.110mb.com/pictures/composites/femaleathlete/europeanfemaleathletes.jpg
No 10 is Finnish
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ro2ijOk8JWc/R_I6Dx6YW7I/AAAAAAAAABg/vi6mFqEIPcA/s400/abc.jpg
No 1 is Finnish
Finns don’t look that different from other Circumbaltic peoples in any other way than that they may actually be even more Germanic looking than the average Circumbalt.
Finns are of course indistinguishable from other Northern European peoples.
How about shooting at the racial experts with their own ammunition, old school racial anthropology?
“… one can conclude […] that the dominating sub-race in Finland is the Nordic and not the East-Baltic (even though not as strong as in Sweden) as it is most frequently found in the most highly populated Western and Central parts parts of the country but even is a major component in regions where the Neo-Danubian type is dominant.”
(C.S. Coon, The Races of Europe 1939)
Blondness
Sometimes it is argumented that Finns are darker than other Nordic people because of their supposed Asian ancestry. There is, according to rumour, a remote corner of the country where original black haired aboriginal inhabitants still roam. Where this region is have never been disclosed, but I’m sure that it would be a reasonably known tourist attraction in a small country like Finland. Since around 70-80% of Finns are fair haired, blond people are likely more common in Finland than anywhere else in the world. In fact several sources claim that the largest percentage of natural blondes can be found in Finland. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of all those sources but here’s the map http://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_of_europe.shtml#hair_colour that does not seem to contradict reality.
But of course, even the blondness of the Finnish people can, and will be, turned against them in the wonderfully insane racial court of law. That fact is that blondness can occur among non white people. Some ethnic Asian peoples can have some blond hair when children and an even smaller number of them may remain fair haired in adulthood. These exceptions are used as an argument that there in fact are blond Mongolians and that the Finns are simply Mongols with an enriched genetical (albino) disorder. I never heard anyone trying to explain the fairness of Scandinavians as carrying this mysterious Mongolian albino gene.
Wikipedia:
“Based on recent genetic information carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blonde hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago during the last ice age.”In the light of this research, the Baltic-Finnish ancestors must have lived a long time in Europe and be the same as for all other blondes…
C.S. Coon again:
“If one may judge by a series of 176 hair samples from various parts of Finland, then the Finns, like the Livs, are blonder than the Norwegian total, but less blond than Bryn's selected Eastern Valley farmers. The ash-blond series (Fischer #20-26) accounts for 36 per cent of the whole, while brown (Fischer #6-8) totals 47 per cent, and dark brown and black amount to less than 2 per cent. Reds are negligible, and black and really dark hair less frequent than in Scandinavia. Westerlund's rceruit material106 on a series of 6000 agrees with that of Luther, and yields less than one per cent of red. The Finns and Swedes of the western and southern provinces are almost identical in hair color proportions, although the Finns have a little more ash-blond, and the Swedes a little more brown. The distribution of hair color shows the greatest degree of blondism among the Finns living in Nyland, Finland Proper, and Satakunta - these have over 60 per cent of ash-blond and golden shades, more than the Swedish speakers; while in Carelia and the two Ostrobothnias the lesser blondism already determined for Carelians is found.”
Blue and lightly coloured eyes
This is probably the trickiest one to explain when trying to argue for the Finnish peoples Asian relation. I have never seen a Chinese, Korean, Mongolian or Japanese with other than black or darkbrown eyes. Have you? Finns with black or dark brown eyes are extremely rare.
There’s a map on Eupedia which shows the percentage of different eye colour in Europe.
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_of_europe.shtml#eye_colour
I cannot guarantee that this map is entirely correct, but it corresponds very close to common sense.
Coon again:
“The eye color of the Finns is, as one would expect, prevailingly light, with blue commoner than gray. Westerlund finds but 7 per cent of brown eyes, and 15 per cent of mixed, while Luther's mixed group comprises 15 per cent. Since the eye color of the Finns and of the Swedes in the coastal regions is equally distributed, it is reasonable to suppose that Finland, in this respect, is about equal to Scandinavia. Blue eyes, with a regional maximum of 53 per cent, are commonest in southern Ostrobothnia; while gray eyes, attaining 37 per cent, are concentrated in Finland Proper. In four-fold correlation tables blue eyes go especially with brown, and gray eyes with ash-blond hair. The regional distribution of eye color, while following faithfully that of stature, head form, and hair color, is not as strongly marked as is the case with the metrical characters; the maximum of Westerlund's blue + gray classes combined is 83 per cent in Finland Proper, the minimum 71.8 per cent in northern Ostrobothnia; dark eyes vary only from 5.7 per cent to 9.1 per cent, in the same counties."
High cheekbones.
One of the desired Germanic (Aryan) traits. Something that’s commonly said true or not, about Baltic Finns is that they often have high cheekbones. Curiously, this trait is no longer an Aryan or a Germanic trait when applied to Baltic Finns. No, instead it’s another proof of their supposed Mongoloidness. All those high cheekbones in Swedes, Norwegians and Germans then? Mongoloidness? God forbid no, it’s then of course the sign of pure “Aryanism”! But how common is high cheekbones in Finns?
I have not found any reliable data to confirm or bust this myth but lets give the anthropologist a say:
“Strong cheekbones and flaring zygomatic arches of many Finno-Ugrians, commonly and erroneously assumed to be Mongoloid features, are actually inherited from European Cro-Magnons (Coon 1939, Niskanen 1994b). These two “Paleo-European” features have survived especially well among the Finno-Ugrians of northern Europe because, as the archeological evidence presented by Zvelebil (1986) indicates, the subsistence transition from foraging to farming occurred more recently and with a lesser influx of immigrants in these marginal regions for agriculture than further south. Most other Europeans have been farmers for so many generations (eating soft bread, porridge, etc.) that their cheek bones (which provide attachments for the masseter muscle) have reduced in size in comparison to other parts of their facial anatomy.”(M. Niskanen The Origin of the Baltic-Finns from the Physical Anthropological Point of View 2002)
Craniometry
Let’s kick off with the skull measuring but using a more professional, clinical and modern approach instead of nationalistic and religion driven science:
“The Baltic-Finns and, as a surprise to many people, also the Saami exhibit clearly North European phenotypes. Epicanthic eyefolds, flat faces, coarse straight hair, and other Mongoloid traits are not encountered among them more frequently than among other Europeans (Coon 1939, Brues 1977)”
“The cranial populations are clustered almost as one would expect in light of their geographic relationships. This diagram also demonstrates that the North Europeans (the Finns, Saami, and Swedes) have diverged craniometrically the least from the Cro-Magnons of Europe. This is expected because the transition from hunting to farming occurred both late and without largescale population movements in Northern Europe. In Southern and Central Europe, this subsistence transition occurred earlier and largely as a result of demic diffusion of farmers of ultimately Near Eastern and/or Balkan extraction. As a result, their cranial configuration has changed more. These craniometric analyses demonstrate that the Finns (and presumably other Baltic-Finns) and Saami (although they form their own subset within the European set) possess North European craniofacial configuration with more than average amount of Paleo-European (Cro-Magnoid) features. This finding indicates that the Baltic-Finns and Saami (as well as their Scandinavian neighbors) are indigenous people of northern
Europe and not recent immigrants from elsewhere”(M. Niskanen The Origin of the Baltic-Finns from the Physical Anthropological Point of View 2002)
The Paleo-European features seems to be widely supported by genetical studies as well:
“Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994, Derbeneva et al. 2002, Norio 2003b, Ross et al. 2006 have all suggested that some of the North Eurasian Finno-Ugric-speaking populations may hold genetic traces of early Upper Paleolithic people, who first colonized the North Eurasian regions c. 12,000 BP” (V. Pimenoff Living on the edge population genetics of Finno Ugric speaking humans in North Eurasia 2008)
And the latest contribution to the theory from the field of DNA research:
“Scandinavia holds a unique place […], for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early farmers for more than a millennium before they vanished some 4,000 years ago. The prolonged coexistence of the two cultures in Scandinavia has been cited as an argument against population replacement between the Mesolithic and the present. Through analysis of DNA extracted from ancient Scandinavian human remains, we show that people of the Pitted Ware culture were not the direct ancestors of modern Scandinavians (including the Saami people of northern Scandinavia) but are more closely related to contemporary populations of the eastern Baltic region. Our findings support hypotheses arising from archaeological analyses that propose a Neolithic or post-Neolithic population replacement in Scandinavia. Furthermore, our data are consistent with the view that the eastern Baltic represents a genetic refugia for some of the European hunter-gatherer populations.”
(H. Malmström Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians 2009)
And a study by Hanihara et al from 2003 concludes that
“[the craniometrical] clustering pattern is similar to clustering based on classic genetic markers and DNA polymorph”Which puts Finns right between Germans and Scandinavians craniometric-wise.
(See table;Hanihara et al. Characterization of Biological Diversity Through Analysis of Discrete Cranial Traits 2003)
But let’s throw in a classic racial study from the 1930’s which later was confirmed by Hanihara’s study:
“The Cephalic index shows that Finns are more long-skulled than the Germans, Danes and Slavs yet slightly broader-skulled than the Swedes, Norwegians and Estonians.”
http://carnby.altervista.org/immagini/troemap6.jpg
The Mongolian spot
Yes, this too is rumoured to be something many, if not nearly all Finns are born with and if it is common, then it’s the proof of east Asian ancestry. But what is the Mongolian spot?
From Wikipedia:
“A Mongolian spot ( "Congenital dermal melanocytosis," and "Dermal melanocytosis.) is a benign flat congenital birthmark with wavy borders and irregular shape”And how common is it? Wikipedia again: “Nearly all East Asian infants are born with one or more Mongolian spots. It is also common if only one of the parents is East Asian. They also occur in 90-95% and 85-90% of East African and Native American infants, respectively. Approximately 90% of Polynesians and Micronesians are born with Mongolian spots as are 46% of Hispanic children. The incidence among Caucasians from Europe is between 1-10%. It has been found to be more prominent among Europeans that have had extensive historical interaction with Asian invading cultures, such as the Hun, or among those who are originally of a central Asian origin, most notably among the Hungarians who have a 22.6% occurrence rate among their population”
And what about the Mongolian spot and Finns?
”We examined all babies born live (4346) at two Finnish hospitals in the course of one year to determine the frequency of birthmarks, specially pigmented lesions, among Finnish newborns. All birthmarks excluding common salmon patches on the forehead and neck were recorded and photographed at birth. The babies were re-examined at the age of three months. Various birthmarks were recorded for 241 of 4346 babies, i.e. for 5.5% of all newborns. Ninety-one (2.1%) infants had congenital pigmented skin lesions, 167 (3.8%) had various vascular lesions and 21 (0.5%) had other birthmarks. The frequency of congenital melanocytic naevi was 1.5%. Most of the naevi were less than 20 mm in diameter. Only one child had a giant naevus. The frequency of congenital naevi in our study was the same or somewhat higher than previously described but fewer other pigmented skin lesions were found than in previous studies perhaps due to racial differences.”
(S. Karvonen et al. Birthmarks in 4346 Finnish newborns. 1992)
Lactase persistence Almost all Asians are lactose intolerant. Do the Finns digest milk or are they lactose intolerant as their supposed Asian relatives?
The “normal” state for the majority of the worlds population is lactose intolerance and only a few sub-populations have 50% or more of it’s population as lactose persistent. In fact, only 40% of the world’s population is able to digest milk.
From an article in USA today about lactose persistence:
“The numbers are often given as close to 0% of Native Americans, 5% of Asians, 25% of African and Caribbean peoples, 50% of Mediterranean peoples and 90% of northern Europeans. Sweden has one of the world's highest percentages of lactase tolerant people.”
(USA Today, Sixty percent of adults can’t digest milk 2009)
For Finns the lactase persistence is extremely high in an international comparison.
“83-85% of the Finns are lactose persistent”
(S. Torniainen et al. Lactase Persistence, Dietary Intake of Milk, and the Risk for Prostate Cancer in Sweden and Finland 2007) an extremely high number by international comparison.
It’s lower than the worlds most lactase persistent people the Swedes 95% and one can assume that the Finnish disease heritage may play a significant role in reducing the percentage of lactose persistence from reaching over 90%.
Shovel teeth Asians have shovel teeth, so do Finns. Well, the first claim is supported by this source:
“Chinese and other Mongoloid populations differ from Caucasoids by having a high prevalence of shovel trait and a low prevalence of Carabelli's trait.”(Ferguson et al. The Effect of Shovel Trait on Carabelli's Trait in Taiwan Chinese and Aboriginal Populations 1997)
High prevalence of Carabelli’s trait is apparently the sign of Caucasoidness? How common is it among Finns?
“In a Finnish rural population 79.0 % of 233 persons had the cusp of Carabelli in first upper molars.”(L. Alvesalo Cusp of Carabelli: Occurrence in first upper molars and evaluation of its heritability 1975)
So nearly 80% have Carabllis cusp which occurs with a 70-90% prevalence among Caucasoid populations.
The Finnish language is Asian ?A common myth is that Finnish is related to Mongolian and other Asian languages. If it was, Finnish would belong to a language group called Altaic languages which include the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages). It does not.
Finnish is as European as it can get because the Finnish language is not spoken outside the Baltic Sea region. The speakers of Finnish have not arrived there suddenly from somewhere far East. From a proto-Finnish languages it have evolved in the Eastern Baltic region for at least 3000 years into what it is today.
“It is particularly important to note that the formation of the present-day large language families has not necessarily involved massive population migrations, because languages have spread by way of diffusion just as often as by migration. The main process has in most cases been linguistic assimilation, or language shift, in which an original linguistic diversity of languages has been gradually lost in favour of an expansive family” (J. Janhunen Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when? 2009)
This idea of language shift or rather rapid cultural diffusion corresponds quite nicely with the pre-Uralic and pre-Indo European substrata in Finnish, but more so in Saami language, which suggests that an earlier language have been used in the area. Add to this the Finnish people’s genetical similarity with other Europeans as well as their similar mythology, traditions, culture, way of life. The several hundred very ancient Indo European (Indo Aryan, Proto-Germanic and Baltic) loan words and the fact that the Finnish verb conjugation system does appear to be Indo-European-like and you have all the evidences for the Baltic-Finnish people’s long residence as the immediate neighbours north of the Indo European peoples and the though of a language shift from one unknown language to an Uralic through cultural diffusion is quite obvious.
Language studies have revealed that the 9 (other authors 7-8) different Saami languages (Kildin, Skolt, Ter, Inari, Northern (coast, inland), Lule, Pite, Southern and Ume) are a part of the Finno-Ugric language family but, to make it more difficult, it was recently suggested that the Finnish population has adopted their language from Saami-speaking people while giving up a presumed original Indo-European language.
However, the linguistical evidences for the Baltic Finnish and Saami people being either a proto Indo-European or Indo-European people who gradually shifted into speaking a Finno Ugrian language are profound:
“It is no accident that the westernmost branches of Uralic, that is, Finnic and Saamic, exhibit lexical traces of an almost complete succession of Indo-European donor languages, ranging from Pre-Iranian through Iranian to Baltic, Germanic, and Slavonic. Certainly, in spite of claims to the contrary (Koivulehto 1983), none of the earlier layers of loanwords was received in the current location of the Finnic and Saamic languages. Rather, the distribution and diachronic properties of the borrowings reflect the geographical movement of the ancestral forms of Finnic and Saamic across the forest belt between the Urals and the Baltic Sea.”
“Considering the, presumably, very small size of many local populations and speech communities, it is not unlikely that there were also cases of language shift from Indo-European to Uralic. As the north-western branches of Indo-European, especially Baltic and Germanic, continued their expansion towards the west, their last remnants in the east may well have been absorbed by their Uralic partners and satellites, especially Finnic and Saamic. Such a development is especially likely to have taken place in the Volga-Ilmen-Ladoga region, which must have lain on the trajectory of Indo-European expansion, but which ultimately came to form the homeland of Finnic and Saamic.”
Finnish belongs to the Baltic-Finnish (Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Veps, Vote, Ingrian, Liv) group within the sub-branch of Finnic languages. Finnic belongs to a group called Finno-Ugrian language branch where the other sub-branches are Saamic, Mordvinic, Mariic, Permic, Mansic (incl. Hungarian) and Khantic.
Finno-Ugrian is one of two, the other being Samoyedic, language branches belonging to the Uralic family of languages. Uralic however, is an Eurasian language in the same way that Indo-European languages are Eurasian. Uralic is believed to be a very old language family and therefore it have had a long time to spread over such a large territory from Northwestern Europe to east of Urals and Siberia.
“Uralic, with some 30–40 separate languages, is slightly larger than an average sized family. Judged by the number of speakers it is a relatively small entity, but in view of its territorial extension it is, in fact, one of the larger families in the world. Both the wide territorial extension of the Uralic languages and the small volume of the Uralic comparative corpus suggest that it is an ‘old’ family, that is, that it was formed a long time ago.”
(J. Janhunen. Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when? 2009)
But where was the Proto-Uralic language born?
“The Altai Mountains in what is now southern Russia and central Mongolia have been identified as the point of origin of a cultural enigma termed the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon.
It is conjectured that changes in climate in this region around 2000 BC and the ensuing ecological, economic and political changes triggered a rapid and massive migration westward into northeast Europe and eastward into southeast China, Vietnam and Thailand across a frontier of some 4,000 miles." Answer.com
This migration took place in just five to six generations and led to peoples from Finland in the west to Thailand in the east employing the same metal working technology and, in some areas, horse breeding and riding. It is further conjectured that the same migrations spread the Uralic group of languages across Europe and Asia: some 39 languages of this group are still extant, including Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Saami.”
The central Asian region has always been a place where peoples of various racial background resided. It was a melting pot for cultures, languages, traditions e.t.c.
The proto-Altaic, -Uralic, -Indo European languages have all been spoken there since times immemorial.
The situation some 4000 years ago:
“In such as interply, tribes with Europid features and Mongolids form a zone of manifold and competing cultures belonging together in essential characteristic aspects. Such cultures side by side are clearly to be seen in Tuva (Grac 1967; 1975). Western Mongolia was in the hands of Europid groups as far as we know (Volkov 1974). Evidently the famous kurgans of the High Altai (Rudenko 1953; 1970) were created by tribes who had their winter grazing-grounds farther south on what is today Chinese territory.”(K. Jettmar. Cultures and Ethnic Groups West of China in the Second and First Millennia B.C. 1981)
“Much speculation has been presented concerning the possible linguistic identities of the Karasuk, Andronovo, Okunevo, and Afanasievo Cultures, but nothing certain can be said. Even so, the Indo-European elements in Samoyedic suggest that some early eastern form of Indo-European (Proto-Tocharian?) may have been present in the region either before Samoyedic or in parallel with it.”(J. Janhunen. Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when? 2009)
Finno-Ugrians are all the same people And an Englishman is basically an Iranian since they are both Indo Europeans? A Polish fisherman will find Pakistani village life very familiar because of linguistic relationship?
“There is no such thing as "Finno-Ugrian culture" or "Finno-Ugrian way of life". FU languages are spoken by peoples who live in many kinds of surroundings, all with their own cultures, traditions (and even religions). When speaking of Finno-Ugrian languages, some will think of exotic hunters and reindeer breeders living in a wigwam-like hut on arctic tundra. This picture corresponds, to some extent, only to the northernmost Finno-Ugrians (Sámi, Ob-Ugrian, Samoyed). However, the Finnic, Volgaic and Permian peoples do not fit in with this picture as they have been farmers for thousands of years, and their life has been very similar to that of their Russian-, Swedish-, Latvian- or Turkic-speaking neighbours. Replace the hut with a log house and the tundra with forests and fields; you can also put some apple trees or bee hives around the house. The Hungarians, before settling down in Hungary, were probably horse nomads on the steppe of what is now Ukraine or Southern Russia.”
(J. Laakso. Dept. of Finno-Ugrian Studies of the University of Helsinki)
The basic myths is that Baltic Finnish peoples and their distant linguistical relatives the Saamis are not really Europeans. Well, at least not as much as the rest of us. That they are part Asians or belonging to Mongoloid peoples. A religious German (Blumenbach) that lived 200 years ago liked to measure skulls and somehow managed to place Germans (surprise!) on top and Saamis (and as he saw it, their descendants the Finns) on bottom of his own European racial purity and beauty scale. The Saami people was an easy prey to classify on bottom as they were clinging on to the last nomadic hunter/fisher culture in Europe.
(For more on Blumenbach N. Painter Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race)
Blumenbach even managed to classify Baltic Finns as belonging to the Mongoloid peoples, without ever having seen a Finn, Estonian or a Saami.
And this is something that always pops up on anthropological discussion boards and sites dealing with European ethnicity, do Baltic Finns look Mongoloid?
Pseudoscience based on nonsense from more than 200 years back is still alive and kicking, but here your complete guide to busting the myths.
For a Skadi or a Stormfronter wanna be Viking member with imagined winged helmets it may be a bit of a scare to find out that Finland is the 8th most Germanic nation when it comes to genetics, and that the average Finn is probably more Germanic in looks than most friends of SNPA would ever dream of being. Nordic/Germanic traits a la Nazi ideology: "The "ideal" Aryan has high cheek bones, narrow faces, blue eyes and blond hair." Of all those traits which kind of “proves” one’s Nordic/Germanic ancestry, ethnic Finns sport all these traits as often as other Northern European peoples do.
Phenotype
Finns look different from Scandinavians and other Germanic peoples? http://dienekes.110mb.com/pictures/composites/femaleathlete/europeanfemaleathletes.jpg
No 10 is Finnish
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ro2ijOk8JWc/R_I6Dx6YW7I/AAAAAAAAABg/vi6mFqEIPcA/s400/abc.jpg
No 1 is Finnish
Finns don’t look that different from other Circumbaltic peoples in any other way than that they may actually be even more Germanic looking than the average Circumbalt.
Finns are of course indistinguishable from other Northern European peoples.
How about shooting at the racial experts with their own ammunition, old school racial anthropology?
“… one can conclude […] that the dominating sub-race in Finland is the Nordic and not the East-Baltic (even though not as strong as in Sweden) as it is most frequently found in the most highly populated Western and Central parts parts of the country but even is a major component in regions where the Neo-Danubian type is dominant.”
(C.S. Coon, The Races of Europe 1939)
Blondness
Sometimes it is argumented that Finns are darker than other Nordic people because of their supposed Asian ancestry. There is, according to rumour, a remote corner of the country where original black haired aboriginal inhabitants still roam. Where this region is have never been disclosed, but I’m sure that it would be a reasonably known tourist attraction in a small country like Finland. Since around 70-80% of Finns are fair haired, blond people are likely more common in Finland than anywhere else in the world. In fact several sources claim that the largest percentage of natural blondes can be found in Finland. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of all those sources but here’s the map http://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_of_europe.shtml#hair_colour that does not seem to contradict reality.
But of course, even the blondness of the Finnish people can, and will be, turned against them in the wonderfully insane racial court of law. That fact is that blondness can occur among non white people. Some ethnic Asian peoples can have some blond hair when children and an even smaller number of them may remain fair haired in adulthood. These exceptions are used as an argument that there in fact are blond Mongolians and that the Finns are simply Mongols with an enriched genetical (albino) disorder. I never heard anyone trying to explain the fairness of Scandinavians as carrying this mysterious Mongolian albino gene.
Wikipedia:
“Based on recent genetic information carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blonde hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago during the last ice age.”In the light of this research, the Baltic-Finnish ancestors must have lived a long time in Europe and be the same as for all other blondes…
C.S. Coon again:
“If one may judge by a series of 176 hair samples from various parts of Finland, then the Finns, like the Livs, are blonder than the Norwegian total, but less blond than Bryn's selected Eastern Valley farmers. The ash-blond series (Fischer #20-26) accounts for 36 per cent of the whole, while brown (Fischer #6-8) totals 47 per cent, and dark brown and black amount to less than 2 per cent. Reds are negligible, and black and really dark hair less frequent than in Scandinavia. Westerlund's rceruit material106 on a series of 6000 agrees with that of Luther, and yields less than one per cent of red. The Finns and Swedes of the western and southern provinces are almost identical in hair color proportions, although the Finns have a little more ash-blond, and the Swedes a little more brown. The distribution of hair color shows the greatest degree of blondism among the Finns living in Nyland, Finland Proper, and Satakunta - these have over 60 per cent of ash-blond and golden shades, more than the Swedish speakers; while in Carelia and the two Ostrobothnias the lesser blondism already determined for Carelians is found.”
Blue and lightly coloured eyes
This is probably the trickiest one to explain when trying to argue for the Finnish peoples Asian relation. I have never seen a Chinese, Korean, Mongolian or Japanese with other than black or darkbrown eyes. Have you? Finns with black or dark brown eyes are extremely rare.
There’s a map on Eupedia which shows the percentage of different eye colour in Europe.
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_of_europe.shtml#eye_colour
I cannot guarantee that this map is entirely correct, but it corresponds very close to common sense.
Coon again:
“The eye color of the Finns is, as one would expect, prevailingly light, with blue commoner than gray. Westerlund finds but 7 per cent of brown eyes, and 15 per cent of mixed, while Luther's mixed group comprises 15 per cent. Since the eye color of the Finns and of the Swedes in the coastal regions is equally distributed, it is reasonable to suppose that Finland, in this respect, is about equal to Scandinavia. Blue eyes, with a regional maximum of 53 per cent, are commonest in southern Ostrobothnia; while gray eyes, attaining 37 per cent, are concentrated in Finland Proper. In four-fold correlation tables blue eyes go especially with brown, and gray eyes with ash-blond hair. The regional distribution of eye color, while following faithfully that of stature, head form, and hair color, is not as strongly marked as is the case with the metrical characters; the maximum of Westerlund's blue + gray classes combined is 83 per cent in Finland Proper, the minimum 71.8 per cent in northern Ostrobothnia; dark eyes vary only from 5.7 per cent to 9.1 per cent, in the same counties."
High cheekbones.
One of the desired Germanic (Aryan) traits. Something that’s commonly said true or not, about Baltic Finns is that they often have high cheekbones. Curiously, this trait is no longer an Aryan or a Germanic trait when applied to Baltic Finns. No, instead it’s another proof of their supposed Mongoloidness. All those high cheekbones in Swedes, Norwegians and Germans then? Mongoloidness? God forbid no, it’s then of course the sign of pure “Aryanism”! But how common is high cheekbones in Finns?
I have not found any reliable data to confirm or bust this myth but lets give the anthropologist a say:
“Strong cheekbones and flaring zygomatic arches of many Finno-Ugrians, commonly and erroneously assumed to be Mongoloid features, are actually inherited from European Cro-Magnons (Coon 1939, Niskanen 1994b). These two “Paleo-European” features have survived especially well among the Finno-Ugrians of northern Europe because, as the archeological evidence presented by Zvelebil (1986) indicates, the subsistence transition from foraging to farming occurred more recently and with a lesser influx of immigrants in these marginal regions for agriculture than further south. Most other Europeans have been farmers for so many generations (eating soft bread, porridge, etc.) that their cheek bones (which provide attachments for the masseter muscle) have reduced in size in comparison to other parts of their facial anatomy.”(M. Niskanen The Origin of the Baltic-Finns from the Physical Anthropological Point of View 2002)
Craniometry
Let’s kick off with the skull measuring but using a more professional, clinical and modern approach instead of nationalistic and religion driven science:
“The Baltic-Finns and, as a surprise to many people, also the Saami exhibit clearly North European phenotypes. Epicanthic eyefolds, flat faces, coarse straight hair, and other Mongoloid traits are not encountered among them more frequently than among other Europeans (Coon 1939, Brues 1977)”
“The cranial populations are clustered almost as one would expect in light of their geographic relationships. This diagram also demonstrates that the North Europeans (the Finns, Saami, and Swedes) have diverged craniometrically the least from the Cro-Magnons of Europe. This is expected because the transition from hunting to farming occurred both late and without largescale population movements in Northern Europe. In Southern and Central Europe, this subsistence transition occurred earlier and largely as a result of demic diffusion of farmers of ultimately Near Eastern and/or Balkan extraction. As a result, their cranial configuration has changed more. These craniometric analyses demonstrate that the Finns (and presumably other Baltic-Finns) and Saami (although they form their own subset within the European set) possess North European craniofacial configuration with more than average amount of Paleo-European (Cro-Magnoid) features. This finding indicates that the Baltic-Finns and Saami (as well as their Scandinavian neighbors) are indigenous people of northern
Europe and not recent immigrants from elsewhere”(M. Niskanen The Origin of the Baltic-Finns from the Physical Anthropological Point of View 2002)
The Paleo-European features seems to be widely supported by genetical studies as well:
“Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994, Derbeneva et al. 2002, Norio 2003b, Ross et al. 2006 have all suggested that some of the North Eurasian Finno-Ugric-speaking populations may hold genetic traces of early Upper Paleolithic people, who first colonized the North Eurasian regions c. 12,000 BP” (V. Pimenoff Living on the edge population genetics of Finno Ugric speaking humans in North Eurasia 2008)
And the latest contribution to the theory from the field of DNA research:
“Scandinavia holds a unique place […], for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early farmers for more than a millennium before they vanished some 4,000 years ago. The prolonged coexistence of the two cultures in Scandinavia has been cited as an argument against population replacement between the Mesolithic and the present. Through analysis of DNA extracted from ancient Scandinavian human remains, we show that people of the Pitted Ware culture were not the direct ancestors of modern Scandinavians (including the Saami people of northern Scandinavia) but are more closely related to contemporary populations of the eastern Baltic region. Our findings support hypotheses arising from archaeological analyses that propose a Neolithic or post-Neolithic population replacement in Scandinavia. Furthermore, our data are consistent with the view that the eastern Baltic represents a genetic refugia for some of the European hunter-gatherer populations.”
(H. Malmström Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians 2009)
And a study by Hanihara et al from 2003 concludes that
“[the craniometrical] clustering pattern is similar to clustering based on classic genetic markers and DNA polymorph”Which puts Finns right between Germans and Scandinavians craniometric-wise.
(See table;Hanihara et al. Characterization of Biological Diversity Through Analysis of Discrete Cranial Traits 2003)
But let’s throw in a classic racial study from the 1930’s which later was confirmed by Hanihara’s study:
“The Cephalic index shows that Finns are more long-skulled than the Germans, Danes and Slavs yet slightly broader-skulled than the Swedes, Norwegians and Estonians.”
http://carnby.altervista.org/immagini/troemap6.jpg
The Mongolian spot
Yes, this too is rumoured to be something many, if not nearly all Finns are born with and if it is common, then it’s the proof of east Asian ancestry. But what is the Mongolian spot?
From Wikipedia:
“A Mongolian spot ( "Congenital dermal melanocytosis," and "Dermal melanocytosis.) is a benign flat congenital birthmark with wavy borders and irregular shape”And how common is it? Wikipedia again: “Nearly all East Asian infants are born with one or more Mongolian spots. It is also common if only one of the parents is East Asian. They also occur in 90-95% and 85-90% of East African and Native American infants, respectively. Approximately 90% of Polynesians and Micronesians are born with Mongolian spots as are 46% of Hispanic children. The incidence among Caucasians from Europe is between 1-10%. It has been found to be more prominent among Europeans that have had extensive historical interaction with Asian invading cultures, such as the Hun, or among those who are originally of a central Asian origin, most notably among the Hungarians who have a 22.6% occurrence rate among their population”
And what about the Mongolian spot and Finns?
”We examined all babies born live (4346) at two Finnish hospitals in the course of one year to determine the frequency of birthmarks, specially pigmented lesions, among Finnish newborns. All birthmarks excluding common salmon patches on the forehead and neck were recorded and photographed at birth. The babies were re-examined at the age of three months. Various birthmarks were recorded for 241 of 4346 babies, i.e. for 5.5% of all newborns. Ninety-one (2.1%) infants had congenital pigmented skin lesions, 167 (3.8%) had various vascular lesions and 21 (0.5%) had other birthmarks. The frequency of congenital melanocytic naevi was 1.5%. Most of the naevi were less than 20 mm in diameter. Only one child had a giant naevus. The frequency of congenital naevi in our study was the same or somewhat higher than previously described but fewer other pigmented skin lesions were found than in previous studies perhaps due to racial differences.”
(S. Karvonen et al. Birthmarks in 4346 Finnish newborns. 1992)
Lactase persistence Almost all Asians are lactose intolerant. Do the Finns digest milk or are they lactose intolerant as their supposed Asian relatives?
The “normal” state for the majority of the worlds population is lactose intolerance and only a few sub-populations have 50% or more of it’s population as lactose persistent. In fact, only 40% of the world’s population is able to digest milk.
From an article in USA today about lactose persistence:
“The numbers are often given as close to 0% of Native Americans, 5% of Asians, 25% of African and Caribbean peoples, 50% of Mediterranean peoples and 90% of northern Europeans. Sweden has one of the world's highest percentages of lactase tolerant people.”
(USA Today, Sixty percent of adults can’t digest milk 2009)
For Finns the lactase persistence is extremely high in an international comparison.
“83-85% of the Finns are lactose persistent”
(S. Torniainen et al. Lactase Persistence, Dietary Intake of Milk, and the Risk for Prostate Cancer in Sweden and Finland 2007) an extremely high number by international comparison.
It’s lower than the worlds most lactase persistent people the Swedes 95% and one can assume that the Finnish disease heritage may play a significant role in reducing the percentage of lactose persistence from reaching over 90%.
Shovel teeth Asians have shovel teeth, so do Finns. Well, the first claim is supported by this source:
“Chinese and other Mongoloid populations differ from Caucasoids by having a high prevalence of shovel trait and a low prevalence of Carabelli's trait.”(Ferguson et al. The Effect of Shovel Trait on Carabelli's Trait in Taiwan Chinese and Aboriginal Populations 1997)
High prevalence of Carabelli’s trait is apparently the sign of Caucasoidness? How common is it among Finns?
“In a Finnish rural population 79.0 % of 233 persons had the cusp of Carabelli in first upper molars.”(L. Alvesalo Cusp of Carabelli: Occurrence in first upper molars and evaluation of its heritability 1975)
So nearly 80% have Carabllis cusp which occurs with a 70-90% prevalence among Caucasoid populations.
The Finnish language is Asian ?A common myth is that Finnish is related to Mongolian and other Asian languages. If it was, Finnish would belong to a language group called Altaic languages which include the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages). It does not.
Finnish is as European as it can get because the Finnish language is not spoken outside the Baltic Sea region. The speakers of Finnish have not arrived there suddenly from somewhere far East. From a proto-Finnish languages it have evolved in the Eastern Baltic region for at least 3000 years into what it is today.
“It is particularly important to note that the formation of the present-day large language families has not necessarily involved massive population migrations, because languages have spread by way of diffusion just as often as by migration. The main process has in most cases been linguistic assimilation, or language shift, in which an original linguistic diversity of languages has been gradually lost in favour of an expansive family” (J. Janhunen Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when? 2009)
This idea of language shift or rather rapid cultural diffusion corresponds quite nicely with the pre-Uralic and pre-Indo European substrata in Finnish, but more so in Saami language, which suggests that an earlier language have been used in the area. Add to this the Finnish people’s genetical similarity with other Europeans as well as their similar mythology, traditions, culture, way of life. The several hundred very ancient Indo European (Indo Aryan, Proto-Germanic and Baltic) loan words and the fact that the Finnish verb conjugation system does appear to be Indo-European-like and you have all the evidences for the Baltic-Finnish people’s long residence as the immediate neighbours north of the Indo European peoples and the though of a language shift from one unknown language to an Uralic through cultural diffusion is quite obvious.
Language studies have revealed that the 9 (other authors 7-8) different Saami languages (Kildin, Skolt, Ter, Inari, Northern (coast, inland), Lule, Pite, Southern and Ume) are a part of the Finno-Ugric language family but, to make it more difficult, it was recently suggested that the Finnish population has adopted their language from Saami-speaking people while giving up a presumed original Indo-European language.
However, the linguistical evidences for the Baltic Finnish and Saami people being either a proto Indo-European or Indo-European people who gradually shifted into speaking a Finno Ugrian language are profound:
“It is no accident that the westernmost branches of Uralic, that is, Finnic and Saamic, exhibit lexical traces of an almost complete succession of Indo-European donor languages, ranging from Pre-Iranian through Iranian to Baltic, Germanic, and Slavonic. Certainly, in spite of claims to the contrary (Koivulehto 1983), none of the earlier layers of loanwords was received in the current location of the Finnic and Saamic languages. Rather, the distribution and diachronic properties of the borrowings reflect the geographical movement of the ancestral forms of Finnic and Saamic across the forest belt between the Urals and the Baltic Sea.”
“Considering the, presumably, very small size of many local populations and speech communities, it is not unlikely that there were also cases of language shift from Indo-European to Uralic. As the north-western branches of Indo-European, especially Baltic and Germanic, continued their expansion towards the west, their last remnants in the east may well have been absorbed by their Uralic partners and satellites, especially Finnic and Saamic. Such a development is especially likely to have taken place in the Volga-Ilmen-Ladoga region, which must have lain on the trajectory of Indo-European expansion, but which ultimately came to form the homeland of Finnic and Saamic.”
Finnish belongs to the Baltic-Finnish (Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Veps, Vote, Ingrian, Liv) group within the sub-branch of Finnic languages. Finnic belongs to a group called Finno-Ugrian language branch where the other sub-branches are Saamic, Mordvinic, Mariic, Permic, Mansic (incl. Hungarian) and Khantic.
Finno-Ugrian is one of two, the other being Samoyedic, language branches belonging to the Uralic family of languages. Uralic however, is an Eurasian language in the same way that Indo-European languages are Eurasian. Uralic is believed to be a very old language family and therefore it have had a long time to spread over such a large territory from Northwestern Europe to east of Urals and Siberia.
“Uralic, with some 30–40 separate languages, is slightly larger than an average sized family. Judged by the number of speakers it is a relatively small entity, but in view of its territorial extension it is, in fact, one of the larger families in the world. Both the wide territorial extension of the Uralic languages and the small volume of the Uralic comparative corpus suggest that it is an ‘old’ family, that is, that it was formed a long time ago.”
(J. Janhunen. Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when? 2009)
But where was the Proto-Uralic language born?
“The Altai Mountains in what is now southern Russia and central Mongolia have been identified as the point of origin of a cultural enigma termed the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon.
It is conjectured that changes in climate in this region around 2000 BC and the ensuing ecological, economic and political changes triggered a rapid and massive migration westward into northeast Europe and eastward into southeast China, Vietnam and Thailand across a frontier of some 4,000 miles." Answer.com
This migration took place in just five to six generations and led to peoples from Finland in the west to Thailand in the east employing the same metal working technology and, in some areas, horse breeding and riding. It is further conjectured that the same migrations spread the Uralic group of languages across Europe and Asia: some 39 languages of this group are still extant, including Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Saami.”
The central Asian region has always been a place where peoples of various racial background resided. It was a melting pot for cultures, languages, traditions e.t.c.
The proto-Altaic, -Uralic, -Indo European languages have all been spoken there since times immemorial.
The situation some 4000 years ago:
“In such as interply, tribes with Europid features and Mongolids form a zone of manifold and competing cultures belonging together in essential characteristic aspects. Such cultures side by side are clearly to be seen in Tuva (Grac 1967; 1975). Western Mongolia was in the hands of Europid groups as far as we know (Volkov 1974). Evidently the famous kurgans of the High Altai (Rudenko 1953; 1970) were created by tribes who had their winter grazing-grounds farther south on what is today Chinese territory.”(K. Jettmar. Cultures and Ethnic Groups West of China in the Second and First Millennia B.C. 1981)
“Much speculation has been presented concerning the possible linguistic identities of the Karasuk, Andronovo, Okunevo, and Afanasievo Cultures, but nothing certain can be said. Even so, the Indo-European elements in Samoyedic suggest that some early eastern form of Indo-European (Proto-Tocharian?) may have been present in the region either before Samoyedic or in parallel with it.”(J. Janhunen. Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when? 2009)
Finno-Ugrians are all the same people And an Englishman is basically an Iranian since they are both Indo Europeans? A Polish fisherman will find Pakistani village life very familiar because of linguistic relationship?
“There is no such thing as "Finno-Ugrian culture" or "Finno-Ugrian way of life". FU languages are spoken by peoples who live in many kinds of surroundings, all with their own cultures, traditions (and even religions). When speaking of Finno-Ugrian languages, some will think of exotic hunters and reindeer breeders living in a wigwam-like hut on arctic tundra. This picture corresponds, to some extent, only to the northernmost Finno-Ugrians (Sámi, Ob-Ugrian, Samoyed). However, the Finnic, Volgaic and Permian peoples do not fit in with this picture as they have been farmers for thousands of years, and their life has been very similar to that of their Russian-, Swedish-, Latvian- or Turkic-speaking neighbours. Replace the hut with a log house and the tundra with forests and fields; you can also put some apple trees or bee hives around the house. The Hungarians, before settling down in Hungary, were probably horse nomads on the steppe of what is now Ukraine or Southern Russia.”
(J. Laakso. Dept. of Finno-Ugrian Studies of the University of Helsinki)