Visitors to Scandinavia shook up its genome, but only for a short time.
has been chronicled in countless books, movies, and TV shows, but that doesn’t mean our media-influenced picture of the period is the whole truth.
Like any culture in the distant past, there’s a lot we don’t know about Scandinavia during the Viking Age. A new study published in the journal Cell shows that even the ancestry of the Vikings isn’t as clear as we may believe.
David Díaz del Molino
Researchers from Sweden and Iceland analyzed nearly 300 genomes from Scandinavians who lived as early as 2,000 years ago and compared them to modern-day populations.
The samples came from sites as diverse as burial chambers, sunken ships, and the scene of a massacre in 500 CE.
They found that Scandinavians were far from a cultural monolith, as modern interpretations tend to paint them. Individuals from the eastern Baltic, Great Britain, Ireland, and southern Europe had a major impact on Scandinavia’s gene pool throughout history.
Daniel Lindskog
During the famed Viking Age, migration was at its highest. Because of this, Great Britain and Ireland in particular are represented in the genome across Scandinavia.
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Ancient Scandinavians also had contact with people as far away as the Middle East through trade. Merchants and missionaries were voluntarily migrating to Scandinavia at the time, bringing genes not found in the native population.
That means there were likely at least some migrants who integrated into Scandinavian society. But their impact may not have been long-lasting.