PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Thiseas C. Lamnidis
AU  - Kerttu Majander
AU  - Choongwon Jeong
AU  - Elina Salmela
AU  - Anna Wessman
AU  - Vyacheslav Moiseyev
AU  - Valery Khartanovich
AU  - Oleg Balanovsky
AU  - Matthias Ongyerth
AU  - Antje Weihmann
AU  - Antti Sajantila
AU  - Janet Kelso
AU  - Svante Pääbo
AU  - Päivi Onkamo
AU  - Wolfgang Haak
AU  - Johannes Krause
AU  - Stephan Schiffels
TI  - Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe
AID  - 10.1101/285437
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 285437
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/22/285437.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/22/285437.full
AB  - European history has been shaped by migrations of people, and their subsequent admixture. Recently, evidence from ancient DNA has brought new insights into migration events that could be linked to the advent of agriculture, and possibly to the spread of Indo-European languages. However, little is known so far about the ancient population history of north-eastern Europe, in particular about populations speaking Uralic languages, such as Finns and Saami. Here we analyse ancient genomic data from 11 individuals from Finland and Northwest Russia. We show that the specific genetic makeup of northern Europe traces back to migrations from Siberia that began at least 3,500 years ago. This ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, in particular populations speaking Uralic languages today. In addition, we show that ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age than today, which adds to historical and linguistic evidence for the population history of Finland.