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> No. The real vikings (not the TV ones) were almost universally blond or red-headed. If you are black, your ancestors were not vikings any more than my ancestors were Zulu warriors.

I'm confused why you think "blond or red-headed" has anything to do with whether you have any viking ancestry. Just because my father is blonde does not mean I am. And the point of the article is that our lines merge much sooner than we intuitively believe.

If you are black in any society that has had a mix of European and African ancestry more than ~200 years ago, you are almost certainly partially of European descent. Unless somehow all of your 200+ descendents avoided any sexual contact with any colonial. If you're of Western European descent, you are almost certainly of Viking (i.e. Danish/Norse) descent: they spent centuries pillaging and colonizing different areas of Europe (including England). Therefore, if you're black in the Americas, you're almost certainly descended from both Vikings and the ancestors of the Zulu (considering the Zulu were a kingdom from the 19th century, so you're right, it's unlikely everyone with European ancestors, or even everyone with African ancestors, is). If you're from any country that was a European colony more than 300 years ago, this is likely true, too.

And remember, cross-continental trade is old. People from the African continent have been having children with people from the European continent for thousands of years.

And remember, cross-continental trade is old. People from the African continent have been having children with people from the European continent for thousands of years.

One of these in no way implies the other. Do you have a shag with the baker every time you stop by the corner shop?

You've been indoctrinated with the multikulti propaganda, try to extract the poison, there are people who can help.

Asians and Europeans have admixtures with non-Sapiens human species, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Africans also have non-Sapiens admixtures, but different species.

No Africans have Neanderthal admixture, and no Asians or Europeans have the African admixtures?

Why? How does this jive with your thinly sourced theories?

Whatever theoretical breeding patterns of this sort you want to propose, it is in practice entirely negligible.

And like I said, I know it's not really you who is thinking and proposing it. You're just parroting your indoctrination. You can do better. We're here to help.

sctb is right, of course, that your comment broke the site guidelines egregiously. If you do that again we will ban you. But I need to address a different issue about your comments.

We've banned you for race war in the past and you're still posting such comments to HN, as well as using HN for ideological battle in general. If you keep doing this we're going to ban you again. It is an abuse of the site which destroys its core purpose. Neither we nor the overwhelming majority of the community want to see it here. Therefore, no more of this, please.

Please read the guidelines, which ask us to post civilly, and stop the condescension.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How the fuck did that blatant overt racism not get banned?

This kind of thing is thoroughly toxic to HN.

Blond/red hair doesnt make you viking. But being black or asian does make it extreemly unlikely, just as being blond makes it extreemly unlikely that your paternal great-grandfather was an african king.

With the viking thing, mapping blond hair in the uk, along with family/place names, creates a diagram of the 1066 invasion.

And remember, cross-continental trade is old.

What is your source for claims of trade?

There is no evidence for trade between Europe and Africa going back thousands of years.

Sub-Saharan Africans never developed a written language, this would seem to be a not quite vital, but certainly helpful thing when engaging in trade.

Thousands of years ago there was very little, if any, industry to speak of in sub-Saharan Africa. What was being traded?

Edit:

The poster above referenced black Africans, a distinct population from north Africans, and "cross-continental" trade implying a great distance and regular contact between the African and European races.

While some could argue that it is technically cross-continental as we understand geography today, I don't believe a good faith interpretation(in this discussion) of 'cross-continental trade' includes trade conducted in ancient Mediterranean world.

Uh...

The Nile river valley in Egypt and the coast of the Maghreb was very much a part of the Mediterranean sea network back to the beginning of recorded history. The Phoenician alphabet is actually the ancestor of basically every written language save Chinese and its descendant scripts.

But you're clearly ignoring North Africa. Even without North Africa, Africa was still very much connected to the wider Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese worlds. Musa I of Mali was the person who gave away so much gold on his pilgrimage from Mecca that he literally broke the economy. The crest of the Niger river was a major center of learning (Timbuktu, Djenne), and the geography was known as far back as Greek times. The Ethiopian highlands were early converts to Christianity, breaking off from "mainstream" Christianity circa 200. The Indian Ocean coasts provided one of the major sources of trading fleets for the vibrant Indian Ocean trade, again back at least to Greco-Roman times.

That's the stuff I know off the top of my head.

> There is no evidence for trade between Europe and Africa going back thousands of years.

I take it you're not familiar with Phoenicia, Carthage, Macedonia, or the Roman empire?

> Thousands of years ago there was very little, if any, industry to speak of in sub-Saharan Africa. What was being traded?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_trade

>There is no evidence for trade between Europe and Africa going back thousands of years.

Are you serious? As one example, thousands of years ago (2,350 years ago to be exact) Alexander the Great (a European) conquered Egypt (which is in Africa by the way).

Of course there was tons of trade going on between Egypt/North Africa and Europe for long before Alexander the Great. And, of course, there was tons of trade going on between Egypt and sub-Sahara Africa at the same time (what were they trading? Incense, myrrh, oils, gold, resins, ebony, ivory, animals, etc.)

As for your nonsense about sub-saharan languages:

http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/08/08/11-ancient-african-wr...

> If you are black, your ancestors were not vikings

That is far too strong a statement. Virtually all black Americans have some verifiable level of European descent, so they would definitely have Viking ancestors. For actual Africans, it's less certain, but it's at least plausible that an African would have some Viking ancestors.

The Byzantines recruited Norse soldiers starting in the 9th century. They would almost certainly have all had Viking ancestry since that was about two hundred years into the Viking age. There were some pretty significant Scandinavian settlements there by the 11th century.

Even by the 9th century, the Byzantines had a lot of trade with North Africa and North Africa had a lot of trade with sub-Saharan Africa. If even a bit of interbreeding happened and spread some Viking genes to sub-Saharan Africa that would be plenty of time for them to spread to most of the population.

Obviously, Zulu descent is much less common because the Zulu didn't show up until about a thousand years after the Vikings.

>If you are black, your ancestors were not vikings any more than my ancestors were Zulu warriors.

This seems to be disproving a statement the author didn't make. He was specifically talking about people of European descent.