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History of Finland
The area that now is Finland was settled soon after the Ice Age, beginning from around 8500 BC. Finland was part of the Swedish Empire from about 1200 to 1809, when Russia conquered the country from Sweden and a personal union between the two countries was established. In 1917 Finland declared its independence. A civil war ensued between the socialist "Reds" (supported by Bolshevik Russia) and conservative "Whites" (supported by Imperial Germany). The Whites, after winning the war, established a constitutional democracy. During the Second World War Finland was attacked twice by the Soviet Union but remained an independent democracy, except for Karelia which was lost to the Soviet Union. During the Cold War Finland's politics were influenced by the Soviet Union (see: finlandization) but the country never became a satellite state. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Finland has moved towards closer integration with Western Europe, joining the European Union in 1995.
Earliest origins of the Finns
Finnish and Sami — the language of Lapland's small indigenous minority — are both Finno-Ugric languages and are in the Uralic rather than the Indo-European family. The closest related language to the Finnish with an official status is Estonian. Both Finnish and Estonian are Baltic Finnish or Finnic languages, while other Finno-Ugric languages are more distant.
The origins of the Finnish people and their language are a matter of reinvigorated controversy. In the 19th century the Finnish researcher Castrén prevailed with the theory that "their original home" was in west-central Siberia. Later, a theory of an ancient homeland of all Finno-Ugric peoples situated in the Volga and Kama rivers region in the European part of Russia appeared more credibile. Until the 1970s most linguists believed Finns to have arrived in Finland as late as the first centuries AD. In the 1980s these ideas drastically changed. The old theory got a concurrent version of a wide-ranged "homeland" between the Volga river and Scandinavia. In the light of new archaeological findings, it was concluded that the ancestors of the Finns arrived at their present territory thousands of years ago, perhaps in many successive waves of immigration. During this the possible linguistic and cultural ancestors of the hunting-gathering Sami were pushed into the more remote northern regions.
The newest theory formulated during the 1990´s says that during the Ice Age the ancestors of the Finns lived at one of the three habitable areas of southern Europe, so called refugia. The two other habitable areas were home for the Indo-European and Basque languages. According to this theory the Finno-Ugrics spread to the north as ice melted. They populated central and northern Europe, while Basques populated western Europe. Later the Indo-European language speakers presented agriculture to their neighboring hunter-gatherers. While the Finno-Ugric and Basque hunter-gatherers learned how to cultivate land they also learned the culture and the language of cultivators, so they became Indo-Europeans. Soon these new Indo-Europeans had population growth caused by agriculture, and they moved to new areas and Indoeuropeanized the local hunter-gatherers, and so on. This is how Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic languages were born; however the Finns were not Indo-Europeanized because of their isolated location. This explains why although their languages are not related, the genetic material of Finns and Indo-Europeans of central Europe are closely related. However, this theory is not accepted by the majority of linguists.
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