Deeper in time

In a log cabin in the forest there lived an Estonian. That is to say the ancestors of a people who spoke an ancient tongue, east of the Ural mountains, and to be precise, in the Ob river catchment in western Siberia.

Pine, spruce and birch forests formed their home, amid rivers, bogs and lakes, within that vast horizontal band across northern Eurasia called the taiga. To the south lies the steppe, grasslands spreading from Mongolia / China to Ukraine in the west, as far as Hungary. To the north, the treeless Arctic tundra.

Around 4,200 years ago the forest-river people had a change in fortune, for the better, and this owed to a change in climate. The steppe dried out, and the Indo-Iranian peoples who herded livestock there suffered from repeated famine, and epidemics of plague.

So narrates a 2022 research paper, published in Diachronica, that unravels an ancient migration of Uralic peoples in various directions: to the north and east (speakers of Samoyed languages), to the south (ancestors of Hungarians), and westwards, up the Irtych river, and across the Urals into the Volga catchment.   

A change in climate was one factor – which geologists call the 4.2k event – and there were others. Copper and tin ores were found in eastern Siberia, and also in the southern Urals. Surviving Indo-Iranians found a career as bronze smiths, supplying to northern peoples who now dominated a forest-and-river trading network that spread rapidly westwards into Europe.

“Uralic speakers were the prospectors, miners, boatsmen, trade managers, procurers, and first settlers of trading posts at major river confluences; the Indo-Iranian-speaking Sintashta culture and its successors financed prospecting, trade, and markets,” Riho Grünthal and co-authors say.

“Its traceable prehistory begins with a mostly westward spread bringing daughter speech communities to the middle Volga.”

Wherever they travelled and settled, Uralic speech displaced early Indo-Iranian and European languages. Navigating westwards down the Kama, the ancestors of Finnic peoples reached the Volga at the massive bend in the river where its eastward flow bends to the south, eventually into drier lands and down to the Caspian Sea.

Westwards and upstream paddled and marched Finnic traders into the Baltic and Scandinavia, arriving 3,000 years ago or more. They spoke languages that evolved, among others, into the Sámi languages (in Lapland), Finnish, Estonian, and Livonian.

These invaders and colonisers brought with them Bronze Age weaponry and tools, along with other technological and cultural attributes. Who knows how far Finnic peoples spread - as far south as the Alps and into Italy?

Answers to this question and others are elusive – the arrival of the Iron Age and a cold period drew a curtain across peoples who left no written record, except, perhaps, the later runic inscriptions of Etruscans and Rhaetians.

Celts and Goths, Greeks, Slavs and Romans carved their vigorous and lasting imprints on history in Europe; their arrivals onto the world stage rang like bells, confident of the future - as another set of peoples faded away, or hid in their northern forest and bogland fastnesses.

Their Bronze Age legacy can be heard in the wind in the trees, glimpsed in the sparks of a birch twig fire, felt in picking forest berries and mushrooms, and in the heat of a sauna and quenched in the snow.