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Phenotype for - Sami & Basque peoples

Blue Eyes: North Europe - Sami
Green Eyes: North / Eastern Europe - Sami
Blonde Hair: North Europe - Sami
Fair Skin: North Europe - Sami

Brown/Hazel Eyes: Western Europe - Basque
Dark Brown Hair: Western Europe - Basque
Light Brown Skin/Tanned Skin: Western Europe - Basque

Sami of northern Scandinavia

Basque people of France and Spain - Basque Tribes

Society - Ethnicity: U5a1a & R1b1c*

Society - Ethnicity - Sami: U5a1a

Lapponia / Samiland

The Sámi or Saami are the native inhabitants of northern Scandinavia. The terms Lapp and Lappish are to be avoided. The Sami country, Lapponia or Sápmi, is divided between four states: Finland (Suopma in Sami), Norway (Norga), Sweden (Ruotta) and Russia (Ruossa). There are about 70,000 Sami in Scandinavia. In Norway, between 40,000 and 45,000. Sweden about 17,000, Finland around 5,700 and Russia approx. 2,000. The Sami language (of the Finno-Ugric group) is not just one, but a set of different languages. Some count three distinct languages: East Sami, Central Sami and South Sami, with Central Sami including North Sami, Pite Sami and Lule Sami. In other accounts up to 11 Sami languages are listed. Not all ethnic Sami speak their language. Just 20.000 in Norway, in Finland around 3,000, in Sweden 10,000 and in Russia about 1,000. Most Sami speakers speak North Sami.

The Sami people (also Sámi, Saami, Lapps, sometimes also Laplanders) are an indigenous people of northern Europe inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Their ancestral lands span across an area the size of Sweden in the Nordic countries. The Sami people are among the largest indigenous groups in Europe. Their languages are the Sami languages, which are classified as Finno-Ugric.

The cultural assimilation over many years of the Sami people in the four countries makes it difficult to estimate the numbers of Sami. However, the population is estimated at about 85,000. The Norwegian state recognizes any Norwegian as Sami if he or she has one great-grandparent whose home language was Sami, but there is not, and has not been, any registration of the home language spoken by Norwegian people. Roughly half of all Sami live in Norway, but many live in Sweden as well. Finland and Russia are also home to smaller groups located in the far north. The Sami in Russia were forced by the Soviet authorities to relocate to a collective called Lovozero/Lujávri, in the central part of the Kola Peninsula.

Traditionally, the Sami had a variety of livelihoods; fishing on the coast and in the inland, trapping animals for fur, sheep herding, etc. The best known livelihood is reindeer herding, but only a small percentage of the Sami have been mainly reindeer herders over the last centuries. Today, many Sami lead modern lives in the cities inside and outside the traditional Sami area, with modern jobs. Some 10% still practice reindeer herding, which for traditional and cultural reasons is reserved for Sami people in some parts of Nordic countries.


Society - Ethnicity - Basque: R1b1c*

The Basques (Basque: Euskaldunak) are an indigenous people who inhabit parts of north-central Spain and southwestern France.

The name Basque derives from Medieval French and ultimately from the ancient tribe of the Vascones, described by Ancient Greek historian Strabo as living south of the western Pyrenees and north of the Ebro River, in modern day Navarre and northern Aragon. This tribal name, of unknown etymology, was extended in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages to cover all Basque-speaking people on either side of the Pyrenees.

Basques are now mainly found in an area traditionally known as Euskal Herria, located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay.

This article discusses the Basques as an ethnic group or, as some view them, a nation, in contrast to other ethnic groups living in the Basque area. The history of the Basque region as covered here will focus on how that history bears on the Basques as a people.

Recent genetic studies (Stephen Oppenheimer) have confirmed that about 75% of the people of the British Isles have bloodlines that can be traced to inhabitants of the Basque areas of Spain and France based on Y-chromosome and mtDNA analysis. The originators of these genes are thought to have traveled up the Atlantic Coast in the Upper Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic period.

A similar proportion of the remaining, Romance speaking, inhabitants of the whole Iberian peninsula (both Spain and Portugal) share similar percentages of haplogroup R1b to the people of Britain and Ireland as well as very similar mtDNA ancestry.

Genetics

Although they are genetically distinctive in some ways, the Basques are still very typically west European in terms of their Mt-DNA and Y-DNA sequences, and in terms of some other genetic loci. These same sequences are widespread throughout the western half of Europe, especially along the western fringe of the continent. The Saami people of northern Scandinavia show an especially high abundance of a Mt-DNA type found at 11% amongst Basques. Somewhat higher among neighbour Cantabrians,being the isolated Pasiegos with Mt-DNA V haplogroup of wider microsatellite variation than Saami.

It is thought that the Basque Country and neighbouring regions served as a refuge for palaeolithic humans during the last major glaciation when environments further north were too cold and dry for continuous habitation. When climate warmed into the present interglacial, populations would have rapidly spread north along the west European coast. Genetically, in terms of Y-chromosomes and Mt-DNA, inhabitants of Britain and Ireland are closely related to the Basques, reflecting their common origin in this refugial area. Basques, along with Irish, show the highest frequency of the Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup R1b in Western Europe; some 98% of native Basque men have this haplogroup. The Y-chromosome and MtDNA relationship between Basques and people of Ireland and Wales is of equal ratios as to neighbouring areas of Spain, where similar ethnically "Spanish" people now live in close proximity to the Basques, although this genetic relationship is also very strong among Basques and other Spaniards. In fact, as Stephen Oppenheimer has stated in The Origins of the British (2006), although Basques have been more isolated than other Iberians, they are a population representative of south western Europe. As to the genetic relationship among Basques, Iberians and Britons.

By far the majority of male gene types in the derive from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxon wipeout theory... ...75-95% of British and Irish (genetic) matches derive from Iberia...Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of the Britain and Ireland have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples...

Before the development of modern Genetics based on DNA sequencing, Basques were noted as having the highest global apportion of Rh- blood type (35% phenotypically, 60% genetically). Additionally Basques also have virtually no B blood type (nor the related AB group). These differences are thought to reflect their long history of isolation, along with times when the population size of the Basques was small, allowing gene frequencies to drift over time. The history of isolation reflected in gene frequencies has presumably been key to the Basque people retaining their distinctive language, while more recently arrived Indo-European languages swamped other indigenous languages that were previously spoken in western Europe. In fact, in accordance with other genetic studies, a recent genetic piece of research from 2007 claims: "The Spanish and Basque groups are the furthest away from other continental groups (with more diversity within the same genetic groups) which is consistent with the suggestions that the Iberian peninsula holds the most ancient West European genetic ancestry."

Sami of northern Scandinavia & Basque people of France and Spain

# the Sami of northern Scandinavia (marginalized by Finnish and North Germanic expansion) - U5a1a

# the Basque people of France and Spain (marginalized by Latin/Western Romance expansion) - R1b1c*

I share histories with: Latin, Finnic, Celtic, and Germanic Europe.

I share histories with: Latin, Finnic, Celtic, and Germanic Europe.


Indigenous peoples of Europe:

Y-DNA: R1b1c* AMH

The Basque people of northern Spain and southern France.

mtDNA: U5a1a

The Sami people of northern Scandinavia.


Latin Europe: R1b1c* AMH

Italians
French+Walloons+Romands
Spaniards
Portuguese

Walloons: R1b1c* AMH

The name is derived from "walhaz", which was a term used by the ancient Germanic Tribes to refer to "Celtic" people. (Other modern derivatives of "walhaz" include "Welsh", "Wallis", and "Wallachia".) A more modern popular interpretation attributed to "Wallonia" is "the land of the valleys" (i.e., reading "wal-" as cognate with French "vallée", etc.), which has been used by the ministry of tourism in touristic road signs, typically in French as "pays des vallées". The part of Wallonia south and east of the Meuse is indeed remarkably hilly.

Recent genetic studies in Wallonia have shown in Y-chromosomes that most Walloons share their genes with the Celts.


Finnic peoples: U5a1a

* Finns
* Estonians
* Sami
* Mordvins
* Udmurts
* Mari
* Komi
* Karelians

Celtic Europe: R1b1c* AMH / U5a1a

* Irish
* Scots
* Welsh
* Bretons
* Cornish
* Manx

# Germanic Europe: R1b1c* AMH / U5a1a

* Germans+Austrians+Alemannic Swiss+Luxembourgers
* English
* Scandinavians
* Dutch+Flemish
* Frisians

Atlantic modal haplotype (AMH).

Haplotype 1.15 is also modal in the Basques and constitutes 41% of the sample, rising to 56% for the cluster of one-step neighbors. This is called the Atlantic modal haplotype (AMH). In each of the Basque, Welsh, and Irish populations, a total of 89 to 90% of the chromosomes are in hg 1, which contains the M173-defined Eu18 hg, with the majority of the remainder in hg 2. The AMH and one-step neighbors are present in the target populations but only one chromosome from this group is found in the Near Eastern samples, and it is absent in India and Central Asia samples. There is no evidence, therefore, that incoming Neolithics or later immigrants originating in the Near East carried the AMH at frequencies as high as those characterizing the Atlantic populations.

Studies suggest the possibility of a Basque/Celtic connection since they show Irish and Basque populations falling very near one another on the first principal component axis, which reflects the spread of Neolithic farmers from the Near East. The relative proximity of the Basque and Irish on this axis reflects the relatively small Neolithic component in these populations. More recently studies have used a northwest to southeast cline through Europe of p49a, f haplotype XV [which forms a subclade of hg 1] to argue that hg 1 in Ireland must be old. All pairwise comparisons of hg distributions between the European and Near Eastern populations are significantly different except for those within the Atlantic group—Welsh, Irish, and Basques—none of which are distinguishable, showing that they form a Y-chromosome community with members more closely related to one another than they are to the other European populations. It should be noted that Basque-Celtic similarity not only implies that Basque- and Celtic-speaking populations derive from common paternal ancestors, but that genetic drift in these communities has not been sufficiently great to differentiate them.

The signal of Basque-Celtic similarity depends to a large degree on the AMH, which has much higher frequency in these populations than in other European populations. With one-step neighbors, the AMH composes only 38% of the Frisian sample (significantly different, P 0.05), consistent with the view that the Basques are genetically distinguishable from continental populations generally. As three alleles within this six-locus haplotype are known to follow a southeast to northwest cline in Europe, it is likely that most other European populations will have even lower frequencies than the Frisians. Both the Basque and the Celtic populations show high frequencies of the AMH. Because the former are generally considered to have received a very limited input of Near Eastern genes in the Neolithic, that similarity also suggests that in the British Isles the Neolithic transition did not entail a major demographic shift. Accordingly, farming may have spread in Britain more through cultural transmission than through migration.

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