| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
Viking Men Took Their Women With Them, According To New DNA Study
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
When one thinks of Vikings, the image of big, strapping blonde haired sailors who raided and pillaged their way across Europe, Iceland and into North America most readily comes to mind. Our imaginations and folklore
Before we explore further, however, we need to determine a shared vocabulary. Viking is not the name of an ethnic group, it was a job description. Norsemen went “Viking,” or raiding the coast line, and they were not “Vikings,” as we describe them today. Truth be told, they didn’t wear horned helmets, either. At least, according to Paul Rodgers of Forbes.com, they didn’t. So, calling all Norsemen Vikings, and expecting them to be wearing helmets with two horns is akin to calling all Americans Marines and expecting all Texans to own oil wells. Romantic, but wrong.
According to a new study from the University of Oslo in Norway, we have another part of the story wrong as well. Our legends tell us that “Viking” men boarded ships to raid and pillage their way across western Europe, stealing women to breed with as they went. That might be true in part, but new mitachondrial DNA evidence shows that Norse women were also on many of those trips – more to create trade and communities than to fight and steal. The results of this study, led by Biosciences Professor Erika Hagelberg, were recently published in The Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B.
The research team extracted the teeth and shaved small wedges of long bones from 45 1,000 year old Norse skeletons. The skeletons, dated between AD 796 and AD 1066, were collected from various sites around Norway and are currently part of the Schreiner Collection at the University of Oslo.
The researchers were interested in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the skeletons. The mitochondria found in the cytoplasm of a woman’s egg is passed to her children, making it possible to trace the maternal lineage. The mtDNA taken from the skeletons was compared to mtDNA taken from 5,191 people across Europe and previously analyzed samples from 68 ancient Icelanders. They found that the ancient Icelandic and Norse mtDNA closely matched the genetic material of modern North Atlantic peoples, including Swedes, Scots and English. The closest match, however, came from the modern inhabitants of Orkney and Shetland islands of Scotland. These islands are very close to Scandinavia.
“It looks like women were a more significant part of the colonization process compared to what was believed earlier,” Jan Bill, an archaeologist and the curator of the Viking burial ship collection at the Museum of Cultural History, a part of the University of Oslo, told LiveScience reporter Tia Ghose.
The Daily Mail reports that, according to Hagelberg, women being included on the trips meant that the Norsemen could have children, thus spreading their communities more quickly across the northern seas. The idea of whole families of migrating Norsemen flies in the face of previous studies which suggested that Viking expeditions consisted solely of men seeking foreign women, according to Phys.Org‘s Marcia Malory.
The team plans to continue their studies by comparing ancient Norse DNA to ancient DNA from the UK and the North Atlantic Isles. This would give a more complete picture of how the communities were related.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
redOrbit.com
offers Science, Space, Technology, Health news, videos, images and
reference information. For the latest science news, space news,
technology news, health news visit redOrbit.com frequently. Learn
something new every day.”
Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113296350/viking-men-took-their-women-with-them-121014/
