Origins
{{Artikkeli |sivun nimi=Origins |kieli=englanti |id=14116
|artikkeliteksti=Origins. An overview of the origins and emergence of the Saami and Saami culture.
Background (40,000-9500 B.C.). Modern man (Homo sapiens) made his appearance in Europe during the last Ice Age between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago during the Palaeolithic Stone Age. The Ice Age was at its coldest around 23,000-15,000 B.C. The cold forced communities that had hunted large game animals in the relatively abundant tundra-steppe environment to withdraw from central Europe and central Russia towards the south. From the western half of central Europe people retreated to the southwest, from the eastern half to the southeast, and from central Russia due south. The severance of the east-west network of connections in central Europe that had existed for thousands of years led to the separate regional development of cultural features, and there is also reason to assume that a similar course of development took place with regard to language and physical characteristics. As the climate gradually warmed, people slowly started to return to central Europe from both the southwest and the southeast. A subsequently extinct language - or languages - was presumably spoken on the western side of central Europe. On the eastern side and in eastern Europe, a language (or languages) was spoken which could have led to the emergence of Proto-Uralic, the distant ancestor of the Saami language.
The Ice Age ended around 9500 B.C. with a sudden rise in temperature. At the time, the Continental Ice Sheet still covered most of eastern and northern Fennoscandia. As a result of climatic change, the periglacial tundra-steppe environment and many of its faunal species disappeared, and the present vegetation zones with their characteristic animal species began to form and spread northward. Among the human populations, the adaptation required by the ending of the Ice Age led to a shift from {{Artikkelilinkki|37|Palaeolithic culture into {{Artikkelilinkki|32|Mesolithic. By the beginning of the Mesolithic Stone Age, human occupation had, in the north, extended to central Britain, {{Kuvalinkki|P> <P align="justify"> The settlement of Scandinavia (9500-7000 B.C.). At the end of the Ice Age, most of Fennoscandia was still covered by water and the continental ice sheet. Suitable areas for human settlement were offered by the Norwegian coast, where pioneer settlement appears to have arrived from the North Sea land, and by the southernmost parts of Norway and Sweden, where the pioneer settlement came from north Germany through Denmark. In the coastal region, where the conditions of the time resembled those of Greenland s present ice-free coastal zone, settlement spread rapidly as far as the Varanger Fjord and the Rybachy Peninsula. These conditions permitted the southern Fosna culture and the more northern Komsa culture to become established in the coastal region. Those communities that migrated northward through the hinterland made slower progress and did not reach the Arctic regions of the Nordic countries until much later.
These movements constituted the post-Ice Age population of Scandinavia, from which the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians on the one hand and the Saami of the Scandinavian Peninsula on the other are descended. As this pioneer population of Scandinavia originated in the western side of central Europe, it must have spoken some unknown ancient European language. Later developments led to the adoptionof Indo-European languages in the south and Uralic languages in the north.
The settlement of eastern Fennoscandia (9000-7400 B.C.). By the end of the Ice Age, settlement had returned to the latitude of Lithuania and the upper reaches of the Volga River in eastern central and eastern Europe. The northern and north-eastern regions of eastern Europe were uninhabited tundra, and it is therefore impossible to locate the origins of the Komsa culture of north Scandinavia in that direction. Nor does the available material contain anything that might point to pioneer settlement from the areas east of the Ural Mountains. The Sviderian culture, on the other hand, played an important rolein the western parts of the eastern region, where influence also infiltrated from the western side of central Europe, from the Ahrensburgian culture. In central Russia it was mainly a question of settlement that had come directly from the south. The communities of mammoth hunters of southern Russia had disintegrated by the end of the Ice Age, and new Mesolithic settlers arrived.
The emergence of Mesolithic settlement in central and northern Russia is marked by the spread of a post-Sviderian cultural expression. It is possible that thisculture also contained elements of the language from which {{Kuvalinkki|P> <P align="justify"> Developments in Scandinavia (7000-1700 B.C.). The pre-history of the population of Scandinavia reached its next watershed c. 4000 B.C., when agriculture developed in southern Sweden as far as the border of broad-leaved trees (approximately 60°N). This boundary became an economic and cultural border, south of which a Scandinavian peasant society began to develop, and north of which the Saami hunter-gatherer society evolved. This boundary remained almost unchanged for several thousand years until the {{Artikkelilinkki|1990|Iron Age. </P> <P align="justify"> Around 2800 B.C., the agriculturally oriented [[Tiedosto:{{{1}}}|thumb|600px|{{{2}}}]]
