DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian
joh.cam.ac.uk
joh.cam.ac.uk
Link to preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334525855_Populatio...
I'm not seeing any claims there that are new. It is cool to have more data on spread of culture and genes, but we've already had most of that for decades.
From reports of this paper I have so far read, it doesn't really - despite claims - challenge what we know of the vikings, their comings and goings, and their genetic makeup. Their iron age ancestors were a mixed bunch a thousand years earlier, and those we call vikings had been out and about for centuries all over Europe. Educated common knowledge is well aware that they probably har a variety of looks much like modern Scandinavians.
And it is necessary to continue to reiterate the same basic facts when new evidence continues to support it. For a variety of reasons all kinds of ideas that have been debunked decades ago about the past are still mainstream. And some people get really angry when current historians tell them that those views are wrong because it clashes with their current political ideas and views. Just look at the pure evil shit Mary Beard, a well-respected classicist, got when she dared say that during Roman times there were black people in England (a well-established fact by now).
Unfortunately the alt-right has also taken hold of the past, and they continue to spread all kinds of lies so they can continue to spread their idea of the past, namely that of a white past where non-white people did not exist (just look at the outrage you see when a medieval fantasy tv show casts non-white actors). So more evidence that Scandinavia was also populated by people from southern Europe and Asia is always welcome (even though it wont do a thing to convince people who hold racist views and ideals).
This raises a number of possibilities for where those beliefs come from:
Option 1: It really is true that, around 1950, those places were > 90% "white", but in ancient times they did not used to be. This would mean that the diversity present in ancient times had subsequently been forced out, either via systematic oppression that motivated out-migration, or via active genocide.
Option 2: Census and other data from the past century were systematically falsified, consistently and at a large scale, to support the regime of white supremacy that then dominated Europe, when in fact those populations were considerably more diverse; non-"white" people were just "officially invisible". Moreover, the commonly-reported subjective memories of older people who say they remember such a time are in fact misimpressions -- because memory, as we know, is unreliable, strongly affected by whatever the social reality is.
In other words, either
- large-scale population replacement occurred in these places within just the recent past, or
- the past is tremendously mutable, in which case nothing you understand as history, nor indeed anything you think you remember, can actually be trusted.
Either conclusion would be very compatible with your opening point that everything is really politics.
Interesting the study also shows no Eskimo, Inuit or Native American DNA. Not surprising, but is would be really cool if there were some Native American DNA among viking-age Scandinavians.
I think you are understating the results, even if the summary overblown how "disrupting" the results are. There is a number of interesting findings in the paper.
At the time, "Viking" did not denote certain people or ethnic groups, it denoted an activity - traveling (and raiding) by boat. So a person might be described as "in viking" for the summer.
Only later have the people who did this activity been called "vikings". So nobody "self identified" as viking at the time.
The article muddles this by talking about "ethnic vikings" whatever that means, and "viking ancestry". Probably "Scandinavian" is meant. But the article at one hand talks about "Viking DNA" and at the same time claims vikings are not an ethnic group.
Edit: This criticism applies to the article, not the underlying paper which seem to be much more careful with terminology. It defines a "viking culture" existing outside of Scandinavia (e.g. in Scotland) with Scandinavian cultural links but where members of this culture were not necessarily of Scandinavian descent. It also examines remains of an ill-fated raiding party in Estonia which were Swedish vikings in the traditional definition. And then it examines DNA from viking-age burial sites inside Scandinavia.
It’s well known we went around, even likely as far as asia (buddha statuettes were found in viking graves) and one of our kings (Harald Hårråde) was commander of the Byzantine royal Guard (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Hardrada)
So... far as I see there’s no one who knows Norse history that would find this the least surprising.
Not really sure what the fuzz in the comments is about either. (Oh, and 13’th warrior was "based on" a, most likely, true event, with a, most likely, embellished narrative due to the fantastical language used back then to regale.)
"Ibn Fadlan was a 10th-century Arab[1][2][a] Muslim traveler, famous for his account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars, known as his Risala ("account" or "journal").[b] His account is most notable for providing a detailed description of the Volga Vikings, including eyewitness accounts of life as part of a trade caravan and witnessing a ship burial.[4][5]"
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_expeditions_of_the_Rus...
"Initially, the Rus' appeared in Serkland in the 9th century traveling as merchants along the Volga trade route, selling furs, honey, and slaves. The first small-scale raids took place in the late 9th and early 10th century. The Rus' undertook the first large-scale expedition in 913; having arrived on 500 ships, they pillaged in the Gorgan region, in the territory of present-day Iran, and more to the west, in Gilan and Mazandaran, taking slaves and goods. On their return, the northern raiders were attacked and defeated by the Khazars in the Volga Delta, and those who escaped were killed by the local tribes on the middle Volga.
During their next expedition in 943, the Rus' captured Bardha'a, the capital of Arran, in the modern-day Republic of Azerbaijan. The Rus' stayed there for several months, killing many inhabitants of the city and amassing substantial plunder. It was only an outbreak of dysentery among the Rus' that forced them to depart with their spoils. Sviatoslav, prince of Kiev, commanded the next attack, which destroyed the Khazar state in 965. Sviatoslav's campaign established the Rus's hold on the north-south trade routes, helping to alter the demographics of the region. Raids continued through the time period with the last Scandinavian attempt to reestablish the route to the Caspian Sea taking place in 1041 by Ingvar the Far-Travelled. "
P.S. Just like ancient Roman state was not Italian state or Romanian state.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24436598
Fadlan's descriptions don't actually seem so fantastical & embellished to me, maybe he was that rare thing, a historian in the current meaning of the word.
Edit: and it's a truly fascinating read.
And the headline is pure clickbait.
There are a number of theories concerning the origin of the name. This one is by no means top of the list.
I don't think that's addressing the "DNA of the Vikings" (whoever the Vikings may have been)
It's the bit about the names that's most telling, IMO. If you follow the Primary Chronicle (the earliest source on this), the first rulers of Rus were Rurik, Oleg, Igor, Olga, Svyatoslav, and Vladimir. The first four names are unambiguously Slavic adaptations of Scandinavian names: Hrorekr, Helgi, and Ingvar. Svyatoslav is an unambiguously Slavic name, but if you deconstruct it, its constituent parts are "holy" and "glory", which correspond to the earlier names Helgi and Hrorekr, respectively - so it's quite possible that it was deliberately constructed as a subtle translated reference. And then Vladimir is a purely Slavic name (Waldemar is a Norse / High German cognate, but it was derived from Vladimir, not the other way around).
If there were populations with significant relict Neanderthal DNA, you'd be looking at more like the Celt/Gaul populations, and talking at least a thousand years before that -- think the British isles, before the Angles/Saxons moved in. And even that is very... speculative history.
Very speculative indeed, considering there was plenty of movement of people between the British Isles and the continent before the Anglo-Saxons arrived (who themselves had surprisingly little impact on the genetic makeup of the British people [0]). And if there was significant Neanderthal DNA in the British Isles 1500 years ago, it would still be detectable among living generations (it isn't).
"Neanderthal-derived DNA was found in the genome of all contemporary populations". [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
See also: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/genetic-data-half-mi... ( Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy )
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6363/655 : "We find that non-African populations outside Oceania carry between 1.8 and 2.6% Neandertal DNA"
I had a few head-scratching moments of realization of this when I was into learning Romance languages in my college years, which led me to read about history of various Romance-speaking countries. Look at the Latins. They were a small group in Lazio (Latium). Their culture expanded and absorbed the whole of Italy and then Europe and much of North Africa. (Well known story.) In each of these places there were distinct ethnic divisions, languages, cultures ... which shortly vanished and assimilated. We know very little of those distinctions today. The empire fell and outside sources came in, Germanic peoples, maybe Arabs and North Africans especially in the south. Eventually separate nation-states came about. Today many people assume those nations that emerged are homogeneous identities or ethnicities. They're not really.
Additionally, race in the United States of course has a bunch of bullshit in its history about "white people", where "white people" is a loosely defined and moving definition. I was recently reading about very odd phrases that used to exist, like "octoroon" to describe people with 7 european great-grandparents and 1 African-descended one. They bothered having a word for this. They looked pretty much like "white people". They were discriminated against. To a lesser extent, immigrants from non British or non Germanic parts of Europe were also discriminated against as if "nonwhite". In this 1899 drawing, Anglo-Saxon and German-descended Americans are said to be racially superior to Irish and Iberians, because those are said to share traits and ancestry with black people: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_racism_ir...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...
It got politicized this summer and the dude trolled outrage conservatives a bit after they made it political, but the fact is, he clearly knew more math then them.
Really?
This is hardly dog vivisection by the Royal Society.
If it’s bad science and can be shown to be inconsistent, why ‘lose faith’? That’s what science is about.
The issue is that these elites did not come to their conclusion through science. They came to their conclusion because they are trying to push a certain narrative. Thus, no matter what data you show them, they will always find a way to cling to their narrative. Even worse, you might get cancelled for promulgating data and interpretations that does not fit the narrative.
This is not science!
This is not a response to your comment. Hahaha
You can lose faith in a particular part of the scientific community without losing faith in the scientific method.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064
They remain up despite flagging and reporting. What value, in your mind, do these bring?
(I'm mentioning this here since it's a detached thread anyway)
If you want to argue with the science or point out deficiencies you're encouraged to. That's the beauty of science.
Geneticists simply said that they had the genes for blue eyes while the European genes associated with fair skin were not present. What wasn't said was that they were black – that was something the media simply made up because it fit with their agenda. It seems fair to assume they were darker than modern Northern Europeans, but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
“African peoples” have a pretty broad range of pigmentation, and “black” isn’t used exclusively for African people, anyhow; e.g., indigenous Australians.
It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly.
Couldn't find a better illustration of how race is a fluid social construct.
That’s a pretty impressive generalization. It’s also not very charitable to imply that people are being defensive about some sort of racial homeland instead of taking them at their word that they are skeptical of the wild conclusions that aren’t supported by the science.
I wasn't commenting about the original poster but about the broad community that have been making this exact argument about this exact issue since it entered the public debate, and a wide number of other issues for, well, almost the entire time that population studies that would support this kind of discussion of the past have existed.
(And, yes, you can see identical behavior referencing different identity divides besides white and non-white in the same period over the same broad class of past-population issues, but this specific issue of darker-skinned past inhabitants of the British Isles is one of the focuses of whites and the flexible nature of the label “black”.)
Nobody is questioning the ancestral homeland of anyone. Just because some Scandanavians were dark skinned or had ancestors from outside Scandanavia - maybe even somewhere where people were mostly dark skinned - doesn't mean they weren't Scandanavian, unless you choose to believe that "Scandanavia" is a racial and not a geographic term.
At some point in relatively recent history some European ethno-nationalists developed this concept of a "racial homeland" and unfortunately to this day that way of thinking holds appeal among some groups.
All humans ultimately descend from hominids from more equatorial regions, and on the scale of hominid history we've only very recently left those regions.
> If race is a social construct then there isn't a Black nation, Black peoples, or anything ancestral to anyone who identifies as Black.
It's exactly the opposite, black identity exists precisely because race is a social construct, and furthermore is a powerful construct that has dictated the fates of untold millions throughout history.
I am from very Northern European stock and I get very dark with consistent exposure to the sun despite my extensive freckled skin. My brother by the same parents was often mistaken for someone from Southern Italy or Mexico especially if it was Summer.
> it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
Africans also aren't the color black. Nobody said the first Britons were SubSaharan African at all. They just said they had dark skin.
This is bolstered by the discovery that a widespread gene - SLC24A5 - associated with fairer skin is a recent (8k years ago) phenomenon in Europe associated with the arrival of middle eastern farmers, in whom it developed due to their Vitamin-D poor cereal-based diet [1].
The same gene is present across Eurasia through to South Asia, and is partially responsible for pigmentation variation there also, even moreso than in Europe, where the gene is almost ubiquitous today. [2]
Of course it's not the only gene that controls depigmentation. Depigmentation in East Asia is not related to that gene at all - though it could be similarly influenced by cereal-based diets.
1. https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-g...
Focusing on skin and eye color seems imprecise and really, why even bring it up? DNA mutations or markers spread in a population. Then some members of that population travel to distant lands and intermarry (or not, maybe just die,) and spread their DNA mutations around and then die. Hundreds of year later someone sequences the DNA and says, hmm, here's a marker for X population but I found it in territory Y indicating that people moved around or were taken as slaves so there was a lot more mixing than history expects.
Does your theory about the original Britons imply some direct-from-<some continent> migration? If so you'd expect markers for populations on that continent to be present in historical samples without the associated markers associated with a migration via a more lengthy route. So let's test for that which will either prove or not-prove the theory and leave the silly adjectives for twitter.Edit: apparently the theory is about paleolithic people (who did a lot of fishing) in Britain being dark-skinned, which is certainly believable.
Edit: I guess that's what the whole argument upthread is about - apparently researchers said that paleolithic british settlers were dark skinned, and became light skinned with the switch to agriculture. Which is very plausible.
T
When have they been worth putting any faith in? Back when they were all theology schools? Back when the elite academic establishment drove Ignaz Semmelweis to an early grave for daring to suggest doctors wash their hands? The days of the "Invisible College" (why couldn't the enlightenment happen in a real college?)? The days of Freud?
Yes, there are some soft degrees out there, and universities have many problems, like all institutions. And I met my fair share of lazy tenured professors amongst the good ones. But come on, if you've got to dismiss people like this to make a point, there's something wrong with the way you're going about it.
Sorry you feel that way.
> "a few technical skills for teenagers"
Oh OK, yes STEM (for the most part) is pretty good. Now there are valid criticisms of the way it is done (much of the best criticism coming from within STEM schools) but nothing is perfect.
> Yes, there are some soft degrees out there
More than a few (https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates/), and if you break it down by course I think you'll find that a lot of the most common courses are also pretty soft.
To be clear, I'm not complaining about the technical courses (some of which can be very good), almost every sane person trusts scientists on questions about science. It's that once you step outside the stuff that makes clear, empirical predictions a lot of it is pretty soft and always has been (since fields which don't make predictions are never wrong so they never really learn anything).
Edit: in the viking age, the Hamburg end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Empire
TIL thassalocracy is a possible description for 1984's Oceania.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebaXQjp4OQ