Finns In The Shadow Of The Aryans: Race Theories And Racism [first edition]

This book relates what scholars and dilettante literati from the 16th century until the present have said about the origin of the Finns. The 'Father of Anthropology', Joh. Fr. Blumenbach, argued in 1795 that Finns and Lapps belonged to the Mongolian race because they did not speak an Indo-European language. Since then many people have assumed that the Finns had recently come from Asia. This was not the only theory, but the 'Aryans' labelled the Finns as alien and primitive aboriginals in Europe and considered them inferior. Anthropological investigations in the twentieth century disproved these arguments, and modern geneticists say that Finns are genetically near to central Europeans. After the glacial period Finland was settled from the east, south and west and perhaps from the north too. The genetic characteristics of the Finns have been influenced by the different populations who settled in Finland over almost 10,000 years.