Proto-Uralic homeland

It has been suggested that the Proto-Uralic homeland was located near the Ural Mountains, either on the European or the Siberian side. The main reason to suppose that there was a Siberian homeland has been the traditional taxonomic model that sees the Samoyedic branch as splitting off first. Because the present border between the Samoyedic and the Ugric branch is in Western Siberia, the original split was seen to have occurred there too.

However, because the Ugric languages are known to have been spoken earlier on the European side of the Urals, a European homeland would be equally possible. In recent years, it has also been argued on the basis of phonology that the oldest split was not between the Samoyedic and the Finno-Ugric but between the Finno-Permic and the Ugro-Samoyedic language groups.[1] The lexical level is argued to be less reliable, and lexical innovativeness (a small number of shared cognates) can be confused because of the great age of the division. For a long time, no new arguments for a Siberian homeland have been presented.

Both European and Siberian homeland proposals have been supported by palaeolinguistic evidence, but only those cases in which the semantic reconstructions are certain are valid. A Siberian homeland has been claimed on the basis of two coniferous tree names in Proto-Uralic, but the trees (Abies sibirica and Pinus cembra) have for a long time been present also in the far east of Europe. A European homeland is supported by words for 'bee', 'honey', 'elm' etc.[2] They can be reconstructed already to Proto-Uralic, if Samoyedic is no longer seen as the first branch to split off.[3]

More recently, loanword evidence has also been used to support a European homeland. Proto-Uralic has been seen as borrowing words from Proto-Indo-European,[4][5] and the Proto-Indo-European homeland has rarely been located east of the Urals. Proto-Uralic even seems to have developed in close contact with Proto-Indo-Iranian,[6] which is seen as having arisen in the Poltavka culture of the Caspian steppes before its spread to Asia.[7]

The Lyalovo culture (ca. 5000–3650 BC) has been equated with the Proto-Uralic urheimat, and the following Volosovo culture (ca. 3650–1900 BC) with the Proto-Finno-Ugric urheimat.[8] Some scholars believe that the culture of Lyalovo was in fact the Proto-Uralic urheimat and that its inhabitants spread Uralic languages to north-eastern Europe.[9] The Volosovo culture has been named the Bronze Age Successor Culture, a textile-ceramic culture that developed in the region between Upper Volga and lakes Ladoga and Onega. It was distinguished from other groups based on the traces of textile used for the production of ceramics, and spread southeast all the way to central Volga, south to the entire river valley of the Oka, southwest to the northern shore of the Daugava, and northwest of Fennoscandia to Karelia, Finland and northern Sweden and Norway.[10] Known as the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, it was a culturally unified, extensive network of trade in copper and bronze. The traces of the Seima-Turbino phenomenon are found in a wide area that begins in Sweden and ends in the Altai Mountains.[11][12][13]

However, Jaakko Häkkinen argues that the language of the Volosovo culture was not itself Uralic, but a Paleo-European substratum to Uralic, especially its westernmost branches, and identifies Proto-Uralic with the Garino-Bor culture instead.[14]

The Volosovo region was invaded by the Abashevo cultural groups at about 2300 BC. The latter buried their deceased in kurgans, and they are thought to have spoken a form of Indo-European ancestral to the Indo-Iranian languages and to have influenced the Volosovian vocabulary by introducing Aryan (Indo-Iranian) loan words. The Abashevo contributed to the fact that livestock farming and small-scale farming began to be practiced in the southern parts of the forest zone of Taiga.[15][16]

It has been hypothesized that Pre-Proto-Uralic was spoken in Asia, on the basis of typological similarity with the Altaic Sprachbund[17] and hypothetical early contacts with the Yukaghir languages.[18] Aikio (2014) agrees with Häkkinen (2012) that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir. However, Aikio (2014) puts the date of borrowing much later, arguing that the loanwords he accepts as valid were borrowed from an early stage of Samoyedic (preceding Proto-Samoyedic; thus roughly in the 1st millennium BC) into Yukaghir, in the same general region between the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal.[19]

Archaeological continuity has long been used as the basis of an argument for linguistic continuity. The argument was advanced by Estonians Paul Ariste and Harri Moora in 1956.[20] Just as long, this kind of argumentation has also been heavily criticised. The oldest version of the continuity theory can be called the moderate or shallow continuity theory. It claims that linguistic continuity in Estonia and Finland can be traced back to the arrival of Typical Combed Ware, about 6,000 years ago. This view became mainstream in the multidisciplinary Tvärminne symposium in 1980.[21] At the time, there seemed to be no serious linguistic results to contradict this archaeological view.

The continuity argumentation in the Uralic studies gained greater visibility in the 1990s, when the next step of the continuity theory was popularised (even though this line of reasoning had occasionally received airing). In the radical or deep continuity theory, it is claimed that the linguistic continuity in Finland could be traced back to the Mesolithic initial colonization, beyond 10,000 years.[22][23]

However, in Indo-European studies, J. P. Mallory had already thoroughly scrutinized the methodological weaknesses of the continuity argumentation in 1989.[24] In Uralic studies, it was also soon noted that the same argument (archaeological continuity) was used to support contradicting views, which revealed the method's unreliability.[25][26][27][28]

At the same time, new linguistic results appeared to contradict the continuity theories: the datings of Proto-Saami[29][30] and Proto-Finnic[31] and of Proto-Uralic (Kallio 2006; Häkkinen 2009)[3][32] are both clearly younger than it was thought in the framework of the continuity theories.

Nowadays linguists rarely believe in the continuity theories because of their shown methodological flaws and their incompatibility with the new linguistic results, but some archaeologists and laymen may still advance such arguments.[33]