Fascinating, thanks for the link. It seems (from the website) as though they don’t really tell you anything about your ancestry in the past 1000 years, though? Is that right? I’m thinking about doing it, but I find little interest (personally) in knowing about such distant ancestry many many thousands of years ago, I’d be far more interested in knowing about my genetic links to peoples living in the past 1000 years, maybe up to 2000 years (much is known about my mother’s genealogy back to 1635, but almost nothing is known to our family (yet) about my father’s genealogy before 1880). It sounds like this project doesn’t deal with recent generations but only with thousands of years ago? Thanks for any info.
Yup, it's old, old, old stuff. Now, they do have a FamilyTreeDNA section where people are using their DNA and surnames to find each other but, I haven't utilized that option and don't know much about it. I did peek once and they seem to be having a grand ol time over there, lol. You may like that part.
Even as late as the 13th Century there were few outsiders visiting the area although it's reported that Ghenghis Khan made the journey to see other dwarves (like himself).
The Sapmai didn't really open up to foreign settlement until the late 14th Century. At the same time the Sa'ami in Norway were encouraged to take over farms abandoned by dead Norse. The Black Death seems to have been quite preferential. The Sa'ami suffered less than a 10% death rate. The Norse were killed off at far higher rates leaving vast areas of the Norwegian Coast devoid of population. The resettlement continued to take place until the 1700s.
Which means that if you have a Sa'ami ancestor, he or she probably showed up in your ancestry well within the last thousand years.
This is not that ancient.
This has led to all sorts of confusion throughout Scandinavia ~ until the last couple of years most Scandinavian governments dealt with the Sa'ami more as a "problem" with ethnic overtones and not as an inter-racial situation, or if "racial" that the Sa'ami were immigrants from East Asia.
Since the Sa'ami have been found to be indigenous to the region with no more East Asian ancestry than any other Europeans, there's been a bit of a revision of previous policies.
There's been very little interest on the part of the Europeans regarding Sa'ami migrations to America. That's where folks at FreeRepublic come in.