Finns and Laplanders speak related languages distinct from Indo- European, the main linguistic family of Europe. The Finno-Ugric language group is believed to have originated somewhere between the Ural Mountains and the Volga River. Linguists have naturally supposed that both the Finns and the Laplanders--also known as Saami--hail from that region. But recent genetic studies suggest otherwise. Finns, it seems, are more closely related to the Germans, English, and Italians than to the Saami, and thus they probably came to Finland from the south, not the east.
Molecular geneticists Antti Sajantila of the University of Helsinki and Svante Pääbo of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich found that Finns were more likely to share identical microsatellites-- repetitive DNA sequences--with other Europeans than with the Saami. Meanwhile, more than a third of the Saami in the study group carried three specific genetic motifs that were found in only 1 in 50 Finns and ...
