Prehistoric Germans And Finns

Razib Kahn has a short little recap of what ancient DNA and other sources tell us about the ancestors and linguistic origins of the Germanic and Finnish people. It is summed up in the following image:

He opens with this summary:

A 2023 preprint out of David Reich’s lab seems to have come close to pinpointing the origin of the Baltic’s Finnic peoples, while a 2025 preprint from his rival Eske Willerslev’s group may have uncovered the proto-Germanic tribes’ ancestral homeland in the most unexpected locale. Because whereas the Finnic tribes’ destination was the eastern Baltic, that same zone now appears to have been the proto-Germanics’ and their ancestors’ long mysterious origination point. In a general sense, the Finns’ and Estonians’, and their proto-Uralic ancestors’ more than 1,000-year journey from one end of Eurasia to the other is little surprise, just a refinement whose precise details linguists, archaeologists and now geneticists had long quested to pin down. But the very suggestion that what became Finland and Estonia were meanwhile the mysterious homeland of the earliest proto-Germanic-speaking people comes straight out of left field. Disciplines like archaeology have barely had time to come to grips with the ramifications of this possibility, with early scholarly response thus far amounting to little more than stunned silence.

He also provides a map of the range of the Uralic language families:

Both narratives make sense to me. 

The oldest historically attested homeland of the Germanic peoples, where Old Norse a.k.a. proto-Germanic was spoken, is in the vicinity of Denmark, Southern Sweden, and Southern Norway. But, there was good reason, based upon historic archaeological cultures, the proto-Indo-European homeland, and genetics, to assume that their ancestors were among the Corded Ware people further to the east.

Likewise, there has never been any real doubt that the Uralic homeland was not in Finland, or that it was someplace further east, either in the Ural Mountains themselves, or in the Northeastern Asian region loosely described as Siberia.

To some extent, the arrival of the linguistically Uralic proto-Finns may have provided a motive for the exodus of the proto-Germans.

The genetics also tell us that the proto-Finns arrival followed a pattern familiar in demographic history. A male dominated group arrived, conquered, and took local wives. As Razib explains:

Finnic mtDNA did not differ from that of their Scandinavian neighbors to the west, Finnic Y chromosomes were markedly distinct. About 60% of Finnish men carried haplogroup N, as compared to 7% of Swedish males, 3% of Norwegian men and 1% of male Danes (while N is basically wholly absent from Western and Southern Europe). 

Interestingly, haplogroup N, and Finland’s particular sublineage, is also found in populations to the east, from European Russia all the way out to Siberia’s Pacific coast. In Russia’s frigid far north, half of men carry this lineage, while among the Finnic-speaking ethnicities of the Russian Urals, the Udmurts and Mari, its frequency hovers around 30-50%. Among the Samoyed tribes, over 50% of men carry N. Finally, among the northeasternmost Turkic-speaking people in the world: the Yakuts of eastern Siberia, 80-95% of men are N. 

Though haplogroup N’s ambit is more extensive than the map of Uralic languages today, save for Hungarians, all Uralic-speaking populations harbor N in high numbers. If you are a man who carries N, you may not be Uralic, but if you are a (non-Hungarian) Uralic male, odds are good that you carry N.

We know why Hungary is different. Their Uralic language arrived in central Europe around 1000 CE, when it is historically attested that Magyar conquerers arrived, and didn't admix much with the locals, but through elite dominance, converted the local central European peasants to their language. We even know that these Magyar conquerers ventured west because Turkic speaking tribes of Huns pushed them out.

We also know about the first farmers of Europe, derived from Western Anatolian derived Linear Pottery Neolithic people, and the European hunter-gatherers who preceded them, that came before the people who were the ancestors of the Germans, and then, of the Finns. 

The European hunter-gathers who preceded the first farmers of Europe started from a clean slate in the Mesolithic era, because most of Northern Europe was either under glaciers or too frigid to be habitable around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 20,000 years ago, and these glaciers had to retreat for several thousand years before the region could be repopulated. 

Neanderthals don't appear to have ever managed to populate regions that far north and were extinct many thousands of years prior to the LGM. There were some Cro-Magnon (i.e. modern human) European hunter-gathers, who started to arrive in Europe about 40,000 years ago, before the ice age that gave rise to the LGM quite far north in Europe. They were genetically rather similar to the European hunter-gatherers who repopulated Europe after the LGM. But the pre-LGM European hunter-gatherers either retreated to one of three main refugia in Southern Europe during that ice age, or died.

Slavic people replaced Finns in much of what is now Russia, between their ethnogenesis in the historic era, around the time of the fall of the Roman empire, as they expanded until sometime around the early modern period in Europe, which started around the time of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation (and later into Northeast Asia).