0
Finnic peoples.
Finno-Ugric people are original inhabitants of the European and Eurasian north that belong to a separate "Uralic Family" linguistic group. The Finno-Ugric substratum is present over a wide area within and outside Russia, from Norway to the Urals and down to the Black Sea. During the last glaciation, these people roamed east and west along the ice melt, from England to the Urals and beyond. Yes, the British too have a distant Finno-Ugric past, underlying several layers of immigrants to the Isles.
Is there such a thing as a "Finnish Race?" Firstly there has to be a valid concept of race in general. But in fact the term "race" is merely a construct and races do not exist in reality, except in someone's imagination. Of course all nationalities have their distinguishing characteristics, but these cannot be construed as constituting a particular race as such. There is no actual race of Finns, Russians, or even Englishmen although you can usually tell one from the other by certain features which are defined by the climate and environment in general where various people have lived for a long time. Besides, the term is not useful in most cases because everyone living today is of more or less mixed genetic content. If we take each nationality as a circle, then all the circles are overlapping, but they are not concentric. We have tendencies toward certain behavior, related to the type of environment we have been exposed to for long periods. Russians are not the same as Finns, but they have more in common with Englishmen. Mongolians are not the same as Finns, but they have more in common with Tibetans, and so on. We can put to bed the idea that the Finns wandered in from Mongolia; Finnish genetics point straight to Europe. Finns were the original Europeans, and their range was from the Atlantic to the Urals.
Finns have been put into the Mongolian race by some historians. Of course this is absurd, since the ancestors of Finns have lived in the north, and "Finland" (not the present political boundary but an area reaching at least one thousand kilometers east) for millennia. This was started by someone who believed that Finns are not indigenous, so they had to come from somewhere, and to these sources, Mongolia was "east" and Finns must have come from that direction. Who says Finns are not indigenous? Finno-Ugric people were the original inhabitants of central Europe. Recently some ultra-nationalistic ethnic Russians ("Slavs") want to propagate this theory so perhaps it can make the Finnish tribes appear to settle on their land as squatters, and therefore they have the right to toss them off as they wish. Already in 2005, the president has declared many of the cities captured in 1944, as "old Russian" cities, though 99% of the population was ethnic Finn/Karelian.
In fact most Europeans are indigenous going back further than the last ice age. That might surprise some, but it really makes sense. How can Saami of Finland be indigenous people of Europe, but everyone else are immigrants? We know this much: part of the Finno-Ugric substratum lived in the north and part possibly came from elsewhere, perhaps even Sumeria, not Mongolia. The writer has compared Finnish and Sumerian, and indeed there does appear to be an interesting correlation. Zecharia Sitchin, who is a scholar of ancient Sumeria, states that there is a solid linguistic connection. He states a lot of other things too, which give a lot of food for imagination regarding the ancient world and how we got here.
As the ice retreated about 10,000 years ago, stone-age men, perhaps early Finns, occupied the rich new lands between Norway and the Urals. They were followed by other wanderers in the North, many of which were Germanic. According to Matti Klinge, (University of Helsinki), the dominant "genetic element" in Finland today is Germanic. Perhaps Germanic people had also followed game northward since the dawn of history and were accepted there amongst the Finns. When the waves of disease swept over Europe, it is possible that the germanic genetic traits (ie. the ones carrying specific immune factors, such as blood type A), survived because the immune factors were already there and did not have to be produced by the Human Immune Response. In this way, beneficial traits were gradually imported along with technology to the North from Europe.
The eastern Finnic nations mixed with wanderers from the south and east and therefore they differ genetically from the western Finns. This genetic variability was beneficial to the eastern Finns as well. Biological diversity is what helps species to survive, and this applied to the Finns as well. Naturally, in different geographical areas gene pools differ due to "genetic drift," which is a very well understood phenomenon. The Volga Finnic people are referred to as Finns here even though they differ significantly in many ways, especially in the language which is mostly conversationally unintelligible to Baltic Finns. http://uralicac.dot5hosting.com/fgpeople.htm
Germanic peoples have occupied the same space as the European Finnic peoples for a significant amount of time, as such theories arose that the Germanic languages are actually a creole of Indo-European and another language, one of the leading ones being Finnic. It's estimated that roughly 1/3 of the Germanic lexicon comes from non-Indo-European sources. Kalevi Wiik, a phonologist, has put forward a controversial hypothesis that the pre-Germanic substrate was of a non-Indo-European Finnic origin. Wiik claimed that there are similarities between mistakes in English pronunciation typical of Finnish speakers and the historical sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to proto-Germanic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Ind...anic_languages
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Arngrim
Haha! So did I! Best proof that anti-realism is a purely abstract myth that has no relevance to human behaviour and every-day reasoning.
Bookmarks