Mankind
Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Winter 2002)
pp.177-212
The European Origin of the Finns
and their Relation to the Indo-Europeans.
Kyosti Julku
The author traces the history of the prevailing hypothesis
which assumes that the ancestors of the present-day
Finns and Estonians migrated into their contemporary
north European homeland as recently as two thousand
years ago. Instead, he suggests that during the latter
part of the Würm glaciation, more than ten thousand
years ago, when northern Europe was still covered
by ice, they and the Saami (Suomi) were hunters and
fishers who occupied an area between the Danube and
the Ukraine. They subsequently followed the retreating
ice northwards into the eastern Baltic, as that area
became habitable. His theory, which is regarded as
controversial, would see Finno-Ugrian speakers inhabiting
northern Europe before Indo-European speaking farmers
displaced them in Northern Germany and western Scandinavia.
