Viking hordes may have been Britain’s ancestors returning home, DNA

When the Vikings first attacked Lindisfarne in Northumberland in 793 AD, it was to start a major upheaval that brought bloodshed, a new language and eventually the creation of England.

The Scandinavian migrants were feared warriors who had seemingly been toughened by generations of survival in the frozen north.

Yet a new DNA study shows that their ancestry may lie closer to home.

Human remains from Scandinavia dating before the 8th century raids show genetic links to Britain and central Europe suggesting there had been a large migration northwards in the centuries before the Vikings had apparently set out.

It indicates that a number of raiders, some of whom were searching for better land to farm, could have been retracing the paths of their ancestors rather than conquering completely unfamiliar territories.

Biomolecular analysis of teeth of people buried on the island of Oland, Sweden – known for its impressive Viking remains – was found to contain ancestry from Central Europe and Britain.

Likewise, researchers found a “clear shift” in genetic ancestry in 8th century Denmark in which Viking communities had genetic links to Iron Age groups much further south.

Experts estimate the shift happened around 500AD.

“We already have reliable statistical tools to compare the genetics between groups of people who are genetically very different, like hunter-gatherers and early farmers, but robust analyses of finer-scale population changes, like the migrations we reveal in this paper, have largely been obscured until now,” said Leo Speidel, the first author of the study said.

The former postdoctoral researcher at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London (UCL) and now group leader at Riken, in Japan, added: “It allows us to see what we couldn’t before, in this case migrations all across Europe originating in the north of Europe in the Iron Age, and then back into Scandinavia before the Viking Age.

“Our new method can be applied to other populations across the world and hopefully reveal more missing pieces of the puzzle.”

The team was able to tease out the migration routes using a new, more precise, method of ancient DNA analysis, called Twigstats which can pick out small differences between genetically similar groups.

They applied the new method to more than 1500 European genomes – a person’s complete set of DNA – from people who lived primarily during the first millennium AD encompassing the Iron Age, the fall of the Roman Empire, the early medieval period, and the Viking Age.

Pontus Skoglund, group leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Crick, said: “Questions that wouldn’t have been possible to answer before are now within reach to us.”

As well as uncovering new migration routes, the technique was also able to back up accounts from the historical record.

At the beginning of the first millennium AD, the Romans wrote about coming into conflict with Germanic groups at their empire’s frontiers, and the new analysis shows that northern groups and Scandinavians were indeed moving south during this period, towards the Roman borders.

There is archaeological evidence for repeated conflicts in Scandinavia at the time, and the researchers speculate that this unrest may have played a role in driving people away from their homelands.

It has been suspected that Viking blood was in the British DNA before the hordes raided in earnest from the 8th century – mikroman6/Moment RF

The team discovered a Scandinavian buried in a Roman gladiator cemetery at York dating from the 2nd to 4th century, who may have been a victim of such conflict, and become enslaved by the Empire and forced to fight.

It also proves a long-held theory that there were already some Norsemen in Britain before the Vikings arrived.

The route had reversed by mid-Millenium with central Europeans travelling northwards before the Vikings set out again at the end of the 8th century.

From that point more Scandinavian DNA was found in the ancestry of Britons and central Europeans.

Peter Heather, professor of medieval history at King’s College London, and co-author of the study, said: “Historical sources indicate that migration played some role in the massive restructuring of the human landscape of western Eurasia in the second half of the first millennium AD, which first created the outlines of a politically and culturally recognisable Europe.

“But the nature, scale and even the trajectories of the movements have always been hotly disputed. Twigstats opens up the exciting possibility of finally resolving these crucial questions.”

The research was published in the journal Nature.

EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel