My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  As a result, groups of people became more isolated. This can be seen from the tools they left behind; increasingly, these show specific local features.

  ***

  When the climate was at its warmest, Sweden was a few degrees warmer than it is today; temperatures were more or less what they are expected to be in a few decades’ time, as a result of the global warming that is currently under way.

  But 8,200 years ago there was a backlash. The cold made a comeback, probably owing to the weakening of currents in the Atlantic, including the well-known Gulf Stream. This brief cold spell lasted for a few centuries. It was at its worst for a period of about four years. People who had managed to adjust to a mild climate were catapulted back into a climate as bitter as that of the Ice Age. It was as if modern-day people from southern Sweden suddenly had to cope with a climate like that of Greenland.

  As if it were not enough that temperatures varied unpre­dictably, the same applied to the sea level. When the great glaciers of the Ice Age melted, the water ran out into the sea and other bodies of water. Moreover, the land rose in much of Scandinavia. The bedrock, once weighed down by kilometre-thick layers of heavy ice, rose up again once the masses of ice had disappeared.

  The land is continuing to rise in much of Scandinavia, but it was a much faster process initially. The hunters of the Stone Age sometimes witnessed entirely new land masses emerging from the sea within a matter of years. Conversely, their settlements and habitual hunting grounds were often engulfed by water.

  That is exactly what happened to Doggerland, where the flooding was particularly catastrophic. People had lived for millennia in the regions between Britain and Denmark. There may have been relatively small groups of mammoth and reindeer hunters there even during the Ice Age. Unlike Scandinavia, which was largely covered by thick glaciers, parts of Doggerland seem to have remained ice-free even during the coldest periods.

  After the end of the Ice Age, Doggerland’s climate grew warmer, just as in the rest of northern Europe. The vegetation changed. Hazel bushes spread over an increasingly wide area where once there had been only tundra, and gradually dense forests of hardwood broadleaf trees also emerged. The old fauna that people had once hunted disappeared. The people who remained in the region were obliged to adapt to a new way of life based more on hunting deer and wild boar.

  At the time when the climate was at its very coldest, parts of the northern coast of Doggerland probably stretched up to the same latitude as the Shetland Islands and the Norwegian city of Bergen. However, the more the sea level rose, the more Doggerland shrank. Researchers calculate that the sea rose by 1.25 metres (4⅛ feet) per century. That corresponds to the changes today’s young people may experience if our emissions and global warming continue at their current rate.

  Doggerland dwindled, becoming increasingly dominated by river deltas, lakes and marshes. Covering reasonably long distances on land became more and more difficult. Canoes became an essential means of transport. Increasingly, the hunting of deer and wild boar was supplemented by fishing and hunting seabirds. The whole region underwent major changes. For all that, however, it was a remarkably productive landscape; some scientists describe it as one of the most favourable environments in the whole of Europe.

  The cold spell that occurred 8,200 years ago was, of course, a major blow that doubtless caused many deaths, both in Doggerland and in the rest of north-western Europe. Three or four generations later – 8,100 years ago – disaster struck once more. Large tracts of rich countryside disappeared under water.

  The reason for this was the Storegga Slide, a very extensive landslide on the seabed in the Norwegian Sea between Iceland and Norway, at the same latitude as the Norwegian city of Trondheim. This landslide gave rise to a tsunami that was the most powerful ever documented in northern Europe.

  Along the Norwegian seaboard, the land closest to the slide, the waves were between 10 and 12 metres (33 and 39 feet) high. No one who was near the shore at the time can have survived. However, those that were up in the mountains – on a hunting expedition, perhaps – would have managed to stay alive. One can only try to picture these hunters’ horror when they returned and found their base camp destroyed by the waves, with all their family members drowned.

  No one on Doggerland’s low-lying shoreline can have survived either. Although the tsunami waves were only three or four metres (10 to 13 feet) high here, the land was flatter than the Norwegian coast, and there were no high mountains where anyone could take refuge.

  It is, of course, theoretically possible that a few of Doggerland’s inhabitants were in their canoes far out at sea, perhaps to fish for mackerel or hunt seabirds. Out on the deep, the tsunami would have been scarcely perceptible, just a few centimetres high. The boat would have rocked a little, but the seafarer would not have felt anything else – until he or she paddled back to the shore, where the wave had destroyed everything. The whole settlement would have been flooded and all friends and family swept away.

  The sea level continued to rise over the centuries that followed. Doggerland is still under water. The land that was home to people for millennia now lies at the bottom of the sea.

  ***

  I began to ponder when my own foremothers had arrived in Scandinavia and which route they had taken. Did they paddle across the sea from Doggerland? Did they walk across a dry Öresund Strait, or did they take the long way round via Finland? To answer these questions, I needed more compre­hensive analyses of my mitochondrial DNA than the Icelandic company deCODE was able to offer.

  In the summer of 2013 I bought a test kit from Family Tree DNA (FTDNA), a US company that specialises in catering to family history researchers. I scraped the inside of my cheek with a small plastic spatula, put the sample in a test tube and sent it in an envelope to the laboratory in the United States. A few weeks later I received the full details of my mitochondrial DNA – the most exhaustive mitochondrial test in existence.

  I found out that I belong to subgroup U5b1b1.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sami?

  My Am I a first reaction when I get to see my result is: ‘Really? Do I have Sami ancestry?’ It’s a big surprise. Nothing I’ve heard so far about my family history has given any indication of such a link. My oldest known female relative in the direct maternal line lived in the western province of Värmland. No one has ever mentioned that she may have been a Sami.

  But the mitochondrial group U5b1b1 is particularly common among Sami people. Nearly half of all the Sami whose DNA has been tested belong to this group. Their particular genetic variant of mitochondria is even known as ‘the Sami motif’, and it is rare among other Europeans.

  It would be cool to be able to prove some Sami roots, I think to myself. Not that it would have any practical or legal implications, of course – any family connections would be much too far back in time.

  The Sami are classed as Europe’s only indigenous people. That means they have special rights laid down in international conventions. All adult Sami are entitled to vote for the Sami Parliament (Sámediggi, or Sametinget in Swedish). Those who belong to Sami villages also have certain privileges as regards hunting and fishing.

  To enjoy rights like these, I can’t just come along with a DNA sample that proves there were family links several centuries ago. I would have to demonstrate some Sami tradi­tions in my immediate family. At least one of my parents or grandparents would have had to speak a Sami language at home. Being adopted – without any genetic links at all – is also accepted for purposes of recognition.

  Tens of thousands of Scandinavians with Sami roots have the Sami motif. Their common foremother probably lived in northern Spain or southern France 18,000 years ago, when the Ice Age was at its coldest. When it grew warmer, her descendants followed the reindeer northwards, but their route seems to have included a diversion along the way.

  In 2004, the Estonian researcher Kristiina Tambets published her doctoral thesis and an article in a scientific journal, en
titled ‘The western and eastern roots of the Saami’. One of the people with whom Tambets collaborated was the late geneticist Lars Beckman, from Umeå, who worked on genetics in northern Sweden for several decades, beginning in the late 1950s. While he focused mainly on the genetics of disease, he was also interested in the question of how Norrland (the northern part of Sweden) was first populated. Today’s DNA technology was not available to Beckman. He worked mainly on individual markers, such as blood groups.

  However, he did manage to publish a number of DNA studies in cooperation with other researchers before his death in 2005. With the help of DNA from samples collected by Beckman, Tambets and other researchers were able to map the route taken by some of the female ancestors of today’s Sami people. They probably left northern Spain and southern France when the climate grew warmer after the Ice Age and migrated northwards. But then they changed direction. They took a turning and continued eastwards – straight through central Europe towards Poland, Belarus and Russia. From there, they gradually migrated further north, via Finland.

  This is why there is considerable variation in haplogroup U5b1b1 in Spain and France, while it is also dispersed through countries such as Slovakia, Poland, Russia and Belarus. It is also to be found even in countries such as Morocco and Senegal, where the descendants of people who migrated south rather than north live today. In much of Europe, haplogroup U5b1b1 is very rare – under 1 per cent. Other haplogroups have become far more common thanks to subsequent waves of immigration. It is only in the very far north that the rare DNA variants are still to be found on a larger scale. An even rarer haplogroup known as V, which also occurs among Sami people, seems to have a similar history, originating in south-west Europe and moving into the eastern and northern regions of the continent.

  We should bear in mind that the Sami motif U5b1b1 and haplogroup V only tell us a limited part of the story about Sami origins. Like most other ethnic groups, the Sami are a mix of people from different places.

  The Uppsala-based geneticist Ulf Gyllensten published a study in 2006 in which he showed that haplogroup Z, which also occurs among Sami people, is most likely to have originated near the Urals and the Volga, in Russia. While U5b1b1 seems to have existed in Finland and Scandinavia for at least 6,000 years, Z apparently arrived at a later stage. That suggests that there was a new wave of immigration from the east only a few thousand years ago.

  To find out more about the earliest history of the Sami, I take the night train up to Jokkmokk, in the province of Lapland, and meet Kjell-Åke Aronsson, the director of the Sami Museum, Ájtte. A trained archaeologist, he wrote his doctoral thesis on how reindeer were domesticated for human benefit. He and others conclude that domestication took place in comparatively recent times, perhaps some 1,500 years ago during the Iron Age. There were wild reindeer in northern Scandinavia before that time, but they were not a dominant factor in people’s lives. Fishing and hunting elk were far more important means of subsistence.

  The natural environment in northern Sweden was not ideal for reindeer until large spruce forests began to expand there. This happened only a few thousand years ago as the climate became somewhat colder. Reindeer like to winter in spruce forests because they can graze throughout the season on the lichens that grow on spruce pines. Deciduous forests, by contrast, offer little for reindeer to live on, especially when the temperature oscillates around zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). A hard ice crust forms at such temperatures, denying the reindeer access to lichen on the ground. Intense cold is less of a problem, as snow is soft and fluffy under such conditions, making it easier to scrape off.

  Aronsson’s work on his doctoral thesis was based mainly on analyses of pollen. These showed how vegetation had changed as domesticated reindeer became common. This was because reindeer droppings acted as a fertiliser, while their grazing habits also affected the vegetation. More recently, Aronsson has begun to examine reindeer DNA in collaboration with Norwegian researchers. However, they have not yet succeeded in identifying any wild reindeer with DNA matching that of domestic animals, which would reveal the latter’s origins. They are pinning their hopes on bones and teeth from the ancient wild reindeer that are emerging from glaciers as the climate grows warmer.

  The Sami languages, too, are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They are Uralic languages related to Finnish, Hungarian and a number of minor languages spoken in northern Russia, especially in parts of the Urals. Linguists have found indications that the Sami languages developed near areas where Baltic languages were spoken – that is, further east than the areas where Sami languages are spoken today.

  Aronsson has his own ideas about how the Sami languages came to northern Scandinavia. His theory is slightly controversial – ‘like swearing in church’, he says. After a little persuasion, he agrees to tell me it anyway. He sees a link between the Sami languages and the early use of iron. These two phenomena appear to have reached northern Scandinavia at around the same time, about 2,000 years ago. If a small group of immigrants were able to transfer a whole new language to an existing population, they must have had something very special to offer, Aronsson thinks. In his view, domesticated reindeer are not a sufficient explanation. Conversely, the art of using fire to transform stone and sand into gleaming metal would be a good reason.

  He also believes that aspects of the traditional Sami religion accompanied the language and the art of metalworking. The Sami shamans, known as nåjder, often decorated their drums with metallic objects. Pewter and silver are important components of traditional Sami jewellery and costumes.

  Aronsson’s theory is based in part on recent archaeological excavations, including some carried out before the building of the railway line between Boden and Haparanda. In the course of the dig, archaeologists found objects several thousand years old that bear witness to a new type of settle­ment where iron was produced.

  My own view is that the Sami languages, metalworking and a number of people may have arrived from the east around 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. This pattern would agree with Ulf Gyllensten’s findings that mitochondria belonging to haplogroup Z also appeared at around that time. Moreover, a large proportion of Sami men’s Y chromosomes reveal kinship with groups living further east. Nearly half of all the Sami men whose DNA has been analysed belong to group N3, which is common in Siberia and in groups speaking Finno-Ugric languages. In western Europe, by contrast, this haplogroup is a rarity.

  When I look into the issue more deeply, it turns out that my mitochondria lack the specific mutations known as the Sami motif. These mutations form a special subgroup of U5b1b1 called U5b1b1a. I, on the other hand, belong to another, far more unusual little group.

  Initially, the administrators at FTDNA manage to identify just five people in the whole world who belong to the same small group as myself. Two of them are Americans with Norwegian roots, which makes sense, given that my oldest known female ancestor came from western Värmland, just a few dozen kilometres from the Norwegian border. The two Americans appear to be closely related, even though they have not found any written sources with supporting evidence. But their lineage and mine separated several thousand years ago.

  Three of my matches come from Spain and Portugal, no less. That seems a little puzzling, but can be explained by the fact that haplogroup U5b1b1 originated in that region during the Ice Age. Many of us migrated to the north, but there were others who stayed put.

  A few months later I get another bite. There turns out to be a woman in Stockholm whose mitochondrial DNA is closer to mine than that of the Spaniard and the two Americans. There are a few steps between us, which may also correspond to a few millennia. Her husband, an active family history researcher, sent the sample to FTDNA. On hearing that we are related, he takes a look in some church records and manages to trace his wife’s oldest relative in the maternal line, one Margareta Nilsdotter, who died in 1687 in Burträsk. Burträsk is a small place in Västerbotten, one of whose claims to fame is that the world’s oldest ski
s were found nearby – the ‘Kalvträsk skis’, which go back 5,200 years.

  Burträsk! So there may be some Sami roots here after all, I think again. However, nothing in the church records suggests that Margareta Nilsdotter might have been a Sami.

  My particular branch and the lineage of everyone with the same variant went their separate ways several millennia ago – perhaps 10,000 years ago, although there is a considerable margin of error. The female forebears of the Sami and my own foremothers seem to have lived near the Nordic region for many thousands of years, possibly even since the ice sheet melted. This is fascinating for a family history researcher, but it is important to remind yourself that these issues are of historical interest only. Who went in one direction or another several thousand years ago has no bearing on today’s Sami identity or on the issue of the Sami’s status as an indigenous people. ‘Being Sami is not a genetic thing,’ Kjell-Åke Aronsson emphasises.

  The fact that the Sami are classed as an indigenous people by a UN convention springs from events over the last few centuries. It was during this period that the Swedish state occupied the regions that Sami groups regarded as theirs. They resorted to brutal methods at times, causing great and enduring bitterness.

  In the seventeenth century, the main problem – from the perspective of the Swedish state and the Protestant church – was that the Sami were not Christians, explains Aronsson. They were regarded as heathens. The Swedish state sent them missionaries, priests and other representatives, who confiscated the shamans’ most vital piece of equipment, their magic drums, and destroyed many votive sites. One shaman was executed for witchcraft.