угро-финската група / Наука / Хуманитарни науки / История

In the 19th century, the Finnish researcher Matthias Castrén prevailed with the theory that "the original home of Finns" was in west-central Siberia. Later, the theory of an ancient homeland of all Finno-Ugric speaking peoples situated in a region between the Volga and Kama rivers in the European part of Russia appeared more credible. Until the 1970s, most linguists believed Finns to have arrived in Finland as late as the first centuries AD. In the 1980s, these ideas changed drastically. The old theory was replaced by the concurrent version of a large "homeland" between the Volga river and Scandinavia. In the light of new archaeological findings, it was concluded that the ancestors of the Finns arrived in their present territory thousands of years ago, perhaps in many successive waves of immigration. During this immigration, the possible linguistic and cultural ancestors of the hunting-gathering Sami were pushed into the more remote northern regions.

According to a study conducted by four scientists, including Cavalli-Sforza LL:
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Principal coordinate analysis shows that Lapps/Sami are almost exactly intermediate between people located geographically near the Ural mountains and speaking Uralic languages, and central and northern Europeans. Hungarians and Finns are definitely closer to Europeans. An analysis of genetic admixture between Uralic and European ancestors shows that Lapps/Sami are slightly more than 50% European, Hungarians are 87% European, and Finns are 90% European. There is basic agreement between these conclusions and historical data on Hungary. Less is known about Finns and very little about Lapps/Sami.[13]
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In the 1970s and 1980s, Professor Harri Nevanlinna and his colleagues claimed that genetic research has shown that Finns are genetically similar to other European peoples but also have also some uniqueness. It was determined that 25–50% of Finnish nuclear genes are Baltic, approximately 25% Siberian, and 25–50% Germanic. However all the peoples of Europe have some amount of "eastern" genes and Finns are not that different from other Europeans. Even the most genetically western population, the Basques, have more than 10% of "eastern" genes.

According to a study the closest genetic relatives of Finns are Germanic language speakers, but relation of Finns to other speakers of Finno-Ugric languages is distant. Indeed, like the Indo-European speakers, Uralic speakers have a large genetic diversity which illustrates the important point that genetic origins do not necessarily correlate with the language origins.

Recent mitochondrial genetic research, which can discover facts concerning tens of thousands of years ago, "supports the assumption of a Western, Indo-European genotype for the Finns".[29]

Kalevi Wiik, a professor emeritus of phonetics at the University of Turku, postulated a controversial theory in the 1990s. According to Wiik, the ancestors of the Finns lived during the Ice Age in one of three habitable areas of southern Europe, so-called refugia, the two other habitable areas being the homes of the Indo-European and Basque languages. According to this theory, Finno-Ugric speakers spread to the north as the ice melted. They populated central and northern Europe, while Basque speakers populated western Europe. As agriculture spread from the south-west into Europe, the Indo-European languages spread among the hunter-gatherers. In this process, both the hunter-gatherers speaking Finno-Ugric and those speaking Basque learned how to cultivate land and became Indo-Europeanized. According to Wiik, this is how the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic languages were formed. Due to their isolated location, the linguistic ancestors of modern Finns did not switch their language. This theory is not accepted by the majority of linguists because Wiik has failed to present proof of a Finno-Ugric substrate in Indo-European languages.

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The birthplace of the Finno-Ugric languages cannot be located with certainty. Central and northern Russia west of the Ural mountains is generally assumed to be the most likely spot, perhaps around the 3rd millennium BC. This is suggested by the high intralinguistic family diversity around the middle Volga River where three highly distinct branches of the Uralic family, Mordvin, Mari and Permic are located. Also reconstructed plant and animal names (including spruce, Siberian pine, Siberian Fir, Siberian larch, brittle willow, elm, and hedgehog) are consistent with this localization. Reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric contains Indo-Iranian loanwords, notably the words for "honeybee" and "honey", probably from the time when Indo-Iranian tribes (such as Scythians and Sarmatians) inhabited the Eurasian steppes.

There is evidence that before the arrival of the Slavic speaking tribes to the area of modern-day Russia, speakers of Finno-Ugric languages may have been scattered across the whole area between the Urals and the Baltic Sea. This was the distribution of the Comb Ceramic Culture, a stone age culture which appears to have corresponded to the Finno-Ugric speaking populations, c. 4200 BC–c. 2000 BC.

There have been attempts to relate the Finno-Ugric languages to the Indo-European languages, but there are not enough similarities to link them with any certainty. Similar inflectional endings exist, but whether or not they are genetically related is not resolvable. A common lexicon not attestable to borrowing is thin, and no sound laws are established.

A portion of the Baltic-Finnic lexicon is not shared with the remaining Finno-Ugric languages and may be due to a pre-Finnic substrate, which may coincide in part with the substrate of the Indo-European Baltic languages. As far as the Sami (Lappic) languages are concerned, a hypothesis has been advanced that the ancestors of the Sami originally spoke a different language, but adopted their current tongue under the pressure of their Finnic-speaking neighbours[citation needed].

The theory that the Finno-Ugric birthplace originally covered a very large area in Northern Europe has been supported more by archaeological and genetic data than by linguistic evidence. Notably, the controversial Finnish academic Kalevi Wiik has argued that Proto-Finno-Ugric was the original language in most of Northern and Central Europe, and that the earliest Finno-Ugric speakers and their languages originated in the territory of modern Ukraine (the so-called "Ukrainian refuge") during the last glacial period, when the whole of northern Europe was covered with ice. This hypothesis, however, has been rejected by nearly all experts in Finno-Ugric comparative linguistics; Wiik's model has been criticized for confusing genetic, archaeological and linguistic concepts, and many see the theory as unscientific.