Vikings weren’t all Scandinavians: DNA

Sci.News, 9/20; GP, 5/22; Amber Larson, Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Northman missing diversity: Could colored Vikings ("pirates") have existed?

(Geo Perspective) Ever wondered if there were many non-white people in Viking Scandinavia? The question has been solved. There were.

Vikings weren’t all Scandinavian, ancient DNA study shows

In the popular imagination, Vikings were fearsome blonde-haired warriors from Scandinavia who used longboats to carry out raids across Europe in a brief but bloody reign of terror.

• Earliest people in Ireland were Black says science: Historian makes fascinating discovery that challenges everything we thought we knew about early humans (msn.com)

But the reality is much more complex, according to an analysis of the genomes of 442 ancient humans from archeological sites in Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland, and other Eastern European countries.

• IMAGE: The maritime expansion of Scandinavian populations during the Viking Age was a far-flung transformation in world history. Margaryan et al sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland to understand the global influence of this expansion (Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall).

The word Viking comes from the Scandinavian term vikingr meaning "pirate."

The Viking Age generally refers to the period from 800 CE, a few years after the earliest recorded raid, until the 1050s, a few years before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

The Vikings changed the political and genetic course of Europe and beyond:

Cnut the Great became the King of England, Leif Eriksson is believed to have been the first European to reach North America — 500 years before Christopher Columbus — and Olaf Tryggvason is credited with taking Christianity to Norway.

Many expeditions involved raiding [Christian] monasteries and cities along the coastal settlements of Europe, but the goal of trading goods like [slaughtered] fur, tusks, and seal fat were often the more pragmatic aim.

“We didn’t know genetically what they actually looked like until now,” said lead author Prof. Eske Willerslev, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and director of the University of Copenhagen’s Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre.

“We found genetic differences between different Viking populations within Scandinavia, which shows Viking groups in the region were far more isolated than previously believed.”

“Our research even debunks the modern image of Vikings with blonde hair as many had brown hair and were influenced by genetic influx from the outside of Scandinavia.”

Prof. Willerslev and colleagues sequenced the whole genomes of 442 mostly Viking Age men, women, children, and babies.

The researchers analyzed DNA from the remains from a boat burial in Estonia and discovered four Viking brothers died the same day.

They also revealed that male skeletons from a Viking burial site in Orkney, Scotland, were not actually genetically Vikings despite being buried with swords and other Viking memorabilia.

There wasn’t a word for Scandinavia during the Viking Age — that came later. But the study shows that the Vikings from what is now Norway traveled to Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland.

The Vikings from what is now Denmark traveled to England. And Vikings from what is now Sweden went to the Baltic countries on their all male "raiding parties."

“We carried out the largest ever DNA analysis of Viking remains to explore how they fit into the genetic picture of ancient Europeans before the Viking Age,” said first author Dr. Ashot Margaryan, a researcher in the Section for Evolutionary Genomics in the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

“The results were startling and some answer long-standing historical questions and confirm previous assumptions that lacked evidence.”

“We determined that a Viking raiding party expedition included close family members as we discovered four brothers in one boat burial in Estonia who died the same day. The rest of the occupants of the boat were genetically similar suggesting that they all likely came from a small town or village somewhere in Sweden.”

The scientists also found genetically Pictish people "became" Vikings without genetically mixing with Scandinavians.

The Picts were Celtic-speaking people who lived in what is today eastern and northern Scotland during the Late British Iron Age and Early Medieval periods.

“Scandinavian diasporas established trade and settlement stretching from the American continent to the Asian steppe,” said Prof. Søren Sindbæk, an archeologist at Moesgaard Museum.

“They exported ideas, technologies, language, beliefs, and practices and developed new socio-political structures.”

“Importantly our results show that ‘Viking’ identity was not limited to people with Scandinavian genetic ancestry.”

The genetic legacy of the Viking Age lives on today with 6% of people of the UK population predicted to have Viking DNA in their genes compared to 10% in Sweden.

“The results change the perception of who a Viking actually was. The history books will need to be updated,” Prof. Willerslev concluded.

The findings were published in the journal Nature. Source

• A. Margaryan et al. 2020. Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature 585, 390-396; doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8