Proto-Uralic homeland
The main reason to suppose that there was a Siberian homeland has been the traditional taxonomic model that sees the Samoyedic branch as splitting off first.
In recent years, it has also been argued based on phonology that the oldest split was not between the Samoyedic and the Finno-Ugric but between the Finno-Permic and the Ugro-Samoyedic language groups.
Proto-Uralic even seems to have developed in close contact with Proto-Indo-Iranian,[8] which is seen as having arisen in the Poltavka culture of the Caspian steppes before its spread to Asia.
[10] Two Finnish scholars believe that the culture of Lyalovo was the Proto-Uralic urheimat and that its inhabitants spread Uralic languages to north-eastern Europe.
[17][18] It has been hypothesized that Pre-Proto-Uralic was spoken in Asia, on the basis of typological similarity with the Altaic Sprachbund[19] and hypothetical early contacts with the Yukaghir languages.
[20] Aikio (2014) agrees with Häkkinen (2012) that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir.
It claims that linguistic continuity in Estonia and Finland can be traced back to the arrival of Typical Combed Ware, about 6,000 years ago.
[37] An alternative view has been presented by Juha Janhunen (2009), who argues for a homeland in southern or central Siberia, somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei river or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian–Mongolian border region.
They presented evidence that the Proto-Uralic homeland was located east of the Urals, likely somewhere in Siberia, and spoken by local hunter-gatherer communities.
[38][39] Rasmus G. Bjørn (2022), citing the previous findings, such as Grünthal et al. 2022, argues that the Proto-Uralic speakers likely resided in Southern Siberia, and may have been part of the local Okunev culture in the Altai region, following the proposals of Janhunen and Peyrot.
Bjørn attributes the "eastern lexical elements" to contact with Turkic, which radiated out from the Amur region and can be associated with Northeast Asian linguistic area.
Häkkinen argues that Late Proto-Uralic and the successive stages of disintegration happened in the Central Ural Region, based on certain tree names and Indo-Iranian loanword layers.
On this basis the early phase of the Seima-Turbino Network in Southwestern Siberia could not yet be associated to the Uralic languages, but perhaps the later stages in Europe could.
[43] A number of population genomic studies in 2018 and 2019 note that the spread of Uralic languages may be associated with observed "Siberian" geneflow (represented by Nganasans) into the Eastern Baltic region.
Nganasans and a historical specimen from Bronze Age Southern Siberia (Krasnoyarsk_Krai_BA; kra001) were found to display the lowest f4 estimate for the eastern ancestry among Uralic-speaking populations, and represent a plausible source.
In contrast, affinity for Ancient North Eurasian-rich ancestry (represented by Eastern Hunter-Gatherers) was not significant and only observed among Western Finno-Ugric speakers.
