Origins

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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 {{{2}}}