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I recall a while back an aurora borealis video (also from Finland) I shared met with a good share of enthusiastic replies. So here is a website with live stream. Click on the image to get to the site, or to YouTube where the stream is anyways. Not much going on there now as I post this. Might be worth a bookmark though.

...So it is no coincidence that when the opportunity arose, we chose the Pasvik River, the river that forms the border between Norway, Russia and Finland. For one simple reason: the Pasvik River alone tells the story not only of the High North, but also of the continent. Nothing less. We followed it from Lake Inari in Finland, where it originates, to Kirkenes, where it flows into the Barents Sea. From the depths of Lapland, where it tells History, to the Arctic Ocean, where it meets future. The Pasvik border can be summed up like this, stories of reindeer and...

On this date in 1854, two Sami men were beheaded for Norway’s Kautokeino Rebellion. The indigenous Sami people — often known as Lapps, although this nomenclature is not preferred by the Sami themselves — had by this point become territorially assimilated to the states of the Scandinavian peninsula across which their ancestral homeland had once spanned. The material benefits of this association for the Sami were much less apparent. In Norway — our focus for this post — Sami shared little of the economic growth in the 19th century save for a startling proliferation of alcoholism. In the 1840s a...

Ancient DNA Reveals Lack Of Continuity Between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers And Contemporary Scandinavians September 24, 2009. Summary The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century [1] , [2] and [3] . Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible [3] , [4] and [5] . Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture [6]. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early...

WHERE DO FINNS COME FROM? Not long ago, cytogenetic experts stirred up a controversy with their "ground-breaking" findings on the origins of the Finnish and Sami peoples. Cytogenetics is by no means a new tool in bioanthropological research, however. As early as the 1960s and '70s, Finnish researchers made the significant discovery that one quarter of the Finns' genetic stock is Siberian, and three quarters is European in origin. The Samis, however, are of different genetic stock: a mixture of distinctly western, but also eastern elements. If we examine the genetic links between the peoples of Europe, the Samis form...

Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Helsinki have analyzed the first ancient DNA from mainland Finland. As described in Nature Communications, ancient DNA was extracted from bones and teeth from a 3,500 year-old burial on the Kola Peninsula, Russia, and a 1,500 year-old water burial in Finland. The results reveal the possible path along which ancient people from Siberia spread to Finland and Northwestern Russia. Researchers found the earliest evidence of Siberian ancestry in Fennoscandia in a population inhabiting the Kola Peninsula, in Northwestern Russia, dating to around 4,000 years ago. This...

The Ural family languages are the third after Indo-European and Turkic most common in Northern Eurasia. According to linguists, the Ural family languages were built from a single proto-language 6000-4000 years old, which was divided into two large branches: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages. Ural-speaking peoples live on giant territories from Baltics to West Syberia and include Finns and Estonians, Karelians and Hungarians, Mordovian Erzya and Moksha, West Siberian Khanty and Mansi, Nenets and others. Do this different peoples share common roots and biological history? And how did these related languages spread over such a wide territory? This questions are addressed...

Exact purpose of these ancient stone constructions is unknown. The main assumption is that they, perhaps, symbolized a border between the world we live in and the world of spirits. Labyrinths were used for rituals to help souls to cross over to the other world. Other hypothesis is that labyrinths, perhaps, served as fishing traps. However, the major flaw in this argument is that many labyrinths have been found inland throughout the world... After entering a labyrinth and circle several times around the center, you leave it through the same entrance. Just after several turns it becomes unclear how much...

The Norwegian Center Against Racism has criticized Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s newly-formed cabinet for failing to “reflect the population”. Rune Berglund Steen, who is head of the NGO, also said the lack of diversity represented a “democratic problem”. “Even Trump’s government has more people with minority ethnic backgrounds than the Norwegian [government],” Steen, who was speaking to broadcaster NRK, said. Among the 68 ministers and secretaries presented by Solberg as she unveiled the new government on Wednesday, only two appear to be of minority background, according to NRK — State Secretary Anne Karin Olli, who is of indigenous Sami heritage,...

Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total. It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia....

Tuesday, 3 June 2014Dr James Thompson Renée Zellweger cropped.jpg Cold Winter theory is very simple: warm blooded, warm climate adapted humans drifted North in search of game, and perished unless they could hunt, cope with the climate, and plan wisely so as to live from one winter to the next. Hence, survivors had more forethought, more behavioural restraint regarding immediate gratification, and a whole lot of other changes to help them adapt to hunting and later farming in cold climates. If any of this is true, people living in the far North should be very bright. All the short-term-ist, happy...

With only 3.000 speakers in Northwest Siberia the Ob-Ugrian language Mansi is on the verge of extinction. Predictions say it will be extinct in ten to twenty years at the latest. The same holds true for Khanti, a member of the same language family. It is for this reason that extensive documentation is so important. Johanna Laakso, professor for Finno-Ugrian Studies at the University of Vienna concerns herself with the documentation of this and other minority languages in the framework of an FWF project and the EU project ELDIA... The documentation of the languages Mansi and Khanti is additionally of...

A Sami (Lapp) family in Norway around 1900Photo: Library of CongressIn the freezing far northern reaches of Europe live an indigenous, semi-nomadic people of fishermen, fur trappers and reindeer herders. Like a thin but stubborn sheet of ice, these people have inhabited Sápmi, a large but sparsely populated area covering parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula for thousands of years. They remained closely tied to nature throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as their clothes, dwellings and other trappings of culture bear witness – here beautifully frozen in film. These people are the Sámi.Sami family in...

NEWTOWN, Conn. --(Ammoland.com)- The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI), as a recognized non-government organization (NGO) of the United Nations, testified at the Arms Trade Treaty negotiations this week, saying “that hundreds of millions of citizens regularly use firearms for the greater good” and that a “treaty that does not support the positive use of firearms is doomed to cause more harm than good.” Richard Patterson, managing director, addressed the delegates at United Nations headquarters in New York City. SAAMI was established in 1926 at the request of the U.S. government to create safety and reliability standards in the...

During a recent mapping of the rare virgin forest in and around the Øvre Dividalen National Park in Troms, Norway, scientists noticed some scars reappearing on the trees. Many trees had some of their bark cut away on one side, leaving marks that were hard to explain. Arve Elvebakk of the University of TromsØ (UiT) headed the study. He worked together with Andreas Kirchhefer, an expert in dating old trees by tree-ring analysis. He had already used ancient pines to chart weather and climate conditions. Could the cuts in the bark have been left by settlers who started farms in...

Artefacts are usually displayed in museums but sometimes there are some that just can’t be put on exhibition – as is the case with one that is hidden deep in the Russian forests. It was known that there were rock carvings on some islands in Lake Kanozero, and Jan Magne Gjerde, project manager at the Tromsø University Museum, went out there to document them as part of his doctoral work however, when he and his colleagues had completed their work, the number of known petroglyphs had risen from 200 to over 1,000. “I still get chills up my spine when...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mothers who have complained through the centuries that their sons will be the death of them may be right -- a Finnish study published on Thursday shows having boys shortens a woman's life span.Each son takes an average of 34 weeks off a woman's life span, evolutionary biologist Samuli Helle and colleagues at the University of Turku found.On the other hand, having daughters adds, but only very slightly, to a woman's life span, said the report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.Helle, a Ph.D student at the university, was trying to prove having large families can...

The low rays of the sun caress the rough surface of a strange stone arrangement on the shore of Inari Lake in Sápmi, or Finnish Lapland. In the shallow water sits a boulder, on top of which rests the Päällyskivi ("Top Stone"), the shape of which resembles the head of an elk. The top stone is supported by three smaller stones. "Everything suggests that this is a seita", says Inari Sámi seita expert Ilmari Mattus, while observing the construction... Seitas, or the old sacred places of the Sámi people, have become the subject of renewed interest. The name varies, depending...

A few weeks ago I posted on a paper, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers.Another one is out in the same vein, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians: The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century...Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible...Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture...Intriguingly, these late...

___________________________________________________________PRESS RELEASE To: ALL MEDIAFor immediate releaseOctober 2, 2008 For more information contact:Ted Novin 203-426-1320 Sporting Arms Industry Statement on Failures of Ballistic Imaging DatabaseNEWTOWN, Conn. -- Following an AP article (“NY new-gun database has yet to lead to prosecution,” September 29, 2008) citing the failures of the New York and Maryland ballistic imaging databases, and testimony yesterday in a Washington, D.C. City Council hearing where the Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence conceded that ballistic imaging has “not been successful,” the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI) – an association of the nation's leading...