As usual, the university's public relations summary of the paper does not match the claims the paper makes. It makes grandiose claims of debunkings and is written from the point of view of whatever societal issue is popular today (identity and population movement).
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.
Project leader professor Eske Willerslev is - as far as I can ascertain - a highly competent and accomplished scientist, but with pattern of political leanings informing his scientific output and media appearances, of which there have been not a few over the years, at least in his native Denmark.
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.
Everything is politics, so saying ''politics informs his scientific output'' like it is some kind of gotcha makes absolutely no sense.
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).
The fact that Britain and Scandinavia were, in ancient and early Medieval times, actually very diverse places, is interesting, because within living memory those places are /believed/ to have been > 90% "white".
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.
You are conflating "diverse" with "non-white", but I think that is anachronistic. The non-Scandinavian DNA referred to is from eastern Europe and Baltics, British isles, central and southern Europe and so forth. That is pretty diverse - but all would be considered "white" by present day standards.
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.
The results are interesting but the article muddles the issue by confusing terminology.
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.
So... this isn’t news at all, but rather can be seen as supporting what our (norwegian here) own older tales and historians wrote down around the time:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimskringla
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.)
The Russian Vikings (i.e. the Vikings who in the 9th century founded the original Russian state - Kievan Rus and accompanying dukedoms around - and ruled it for several centuries after that) were raiding as far as Caspian Sea and Iran and bringing the trophies - goods and slaves - for sale back as far as Scandinavia. So there were a lot of cross-continental blood/DNA mixing during those centuries (9th-12th) until Mongols came and that started another chapter.
Some years ago I watched an interesting documentary on how a bunch of viking swords that all bear the same distinctive engraving were very likely made of steel from Persia. The doc claimed that they were likely using a route along the Volga to get down to the Caspian routinely.
"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]"
"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. "
I would insists on differentiating Rus and Russia.
Rus was not the Russian state. If you want to associate it with any modern nation, then it would be Ukrainian.
But really, it was Rus.
P.S.
Just like ancient Roman state was not Italian state or Romanian state.
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.
Same difference back then.
(Iceland was basically expat Norwegians who held more on to the older beliefs while Norway got ravaged by christianity, and as a consequence of the priests going straight from dying rites to baptisms; the black plague.)
The introduction makes it sound super controversial but the mentioned results sound like exactly what you’d expect. Obviously ancient Scandinavia would have had gene flows from Eurasia, and obviously Viking settlements in the British isles would have non-Scandinavians amongst them...
If you're thinking of the Ukraine/Russian Origin story of Kyivan Rus, do you think Scandinavians settled in the Russia/Ukraine area? There's evidence there was trade between the various empires.
I don't think that's addressing the "DNA of the Vikings" (whoever the Vikings may have been)
The ruling elite of Kievan Rus was originally all Scandinavian, speaking Old Norse, and holding to their customs. This was still the case when they conquered Kiev. But then they gradually intermingled with the local Slavic nobility, switched to Eastern Slavic as the native language, and adopted the local names.
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).
I was really hoping for new information on a statistically significant difference in the amount of Neanderthal DNA in old Viking skeletons versus modern time Scandinavians.
The Viking era was only about a thousand years ago (vs Neanderthals who died about 35,000 years ago). It's highly unlikely they weren't completely modern humans in every sense of the word.
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.
> 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).
As you said, all contemporary populations. So there is nothing to suggest that the British Isles was a Neanderthal genetic time capsule prior to occupation by the Anglo-Saxons, Romans, or Celts. Likely all of these incoming populations were equally as Neanderthal as the existing inhabitants.
Even going back 5500 years to Ötzi, he still only had about 5.5% Neanderthal DNA (compared to about 3% for a modern European). These Vikings would likely have been closer to us than to him.
Considering that Scandinavia was covered in ice (Weichselian glaciation) when the Neanderthals died out, there is no reason to believe that there would be any such differenve.
Yeah, that would be totally expected but the paper isn't even saying that. It's specifically about someone buried as a viking in a settlement in Scotland being non-Scandinavian.
The paper examines DNA from several different sites - a viking settlement in Scotland, a viking raiding party in Estonia and several viking-age burial sites in Scandinavia.
I already lost my faith in the cultural "western" elites. I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative (I am pretty leftist) but I dont see there is coming back from the current environment. 2+2 = 5, original English people were actually black, more diversity has been proved to generate better stock performance of the company.From the flimsiest of evidence a whole new narrative is created, one that match the social issues in vogue today.
I'm not an expert in history, but it doesn't take much reading to understand that our current national, ethnic, and racial identities are all much more recent than popularly believed, and will likely be in flux again in the future of human history. I do not think that is "2+2 = 5" thinking, that seems to just be what happens over time.
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...
There is also Celtic history in what is now Spain, France, Italy... They were some of the peoples I was describing being assimilated into Rome. The current Spanish community of Galicia (the bit of Spain just above Portugal) has its name derived from Romans describing Celts living there. The "-gal" part of the name Portugal also derives from a reference to Celts.
"2+2 = 5" referred to approximations and group theory, it was super interesting branch of math when I was at college, years ago.
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.
“ You cannot reason a man out of what he never reasoned himself into.” Attributed to Jonathan Swift
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.
"I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative"... don't make excuses for conservative views, they are not exclusive to political leanings. Being careful isn't political.
What's so hard to believe about a largely "black" (with blue eyes) population being displaced/integrated with by subsequent migrations? That scenario is supported by the myths of those islands and human migrations are the story of humanity and human cultural developments.
If you want to argue with the science or point out deficiencies you're encouraged to. That's the beauty of science.
It's not that it's hard to believe, it's just that it's not supported by the 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white. Why is that? It may be a good idea to interrogate your biases.
> Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white.
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”.)
Would you say the same if someone questioned the original race of Sub Saharan Africans in distant history? If someone argued some were originally not Black and so therefore the ancestral homelands of Afro-Black people are in question, would you say the same thing or is race only a social construct when trying to define the white race? That is certainly the way the logic seems to be but I think that cuts two ways. If race is a social construct then there isn't a Black nation, Black peoples, or anything ancestral to anyone who identifies as Black. Is that a stance you will defend? It seems like there is a clear definition of race for Black and Brown people but not for white people, often done so politically, and I think that bias is why people question whether the headlines of the GP article are valid and at present it does seem to be a stretch to call Cheddar Man "black".
> Would you say the same if someone questioned the original race of Sub Saharan Africans in distant history?
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.
That's why I put "black" in quotation marks, as it covers a whole range of skin tones that exist mostly in the eye of the beholder. The reconstructions or artistic depictions of those early Britons doesn't make me think Africa as much as it makes me think exposure to the sun by a non-fair-skinned population.
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.
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.
Dark-skinned people in non-fishing populations in the British Isles would have had seriously weakened immune systems from vitamin D deficiency. The theory is implausible on its face.
Edit: apparently the theory is about paleolithic people (who did a lot of fishing) in Britain being dark-skinned, which is certainly believable.
And has not been a major component of British food since the neolithic.
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.
The original English neoliths were dark skinned. You don't have any evidence to support your narrative that everything was white and not diverse. The genetic and archeological evidence (such as finding metal or objects from South Europe in North Europe) is showing that people travelled widely in historic times. I don't understand why this is so controversial to right wingers?
Universities exist to teach teenagers basic literacy skills, and maybe a few technical skills in the STEM degrees. They're mostly just high-school English teachers with a few more qualifications and better writing skills and more dedication (which what it really takes to get the qualifications).
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?
I'm honestly insulted on behalf of all my friends who studied engineering and medicine and worked 40 hours a week for 4 to 7 years to get their degrees - many of whom (including myself) were adults when they started studying. Not to mention the many hard working researchers I've met, dedicating their entire lives to furthering human knowledge for way less money than they'd make in the corporate world. And here's some guy on the web dismissing all of that as "a few technical skills for teenagers".
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.
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.
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).
Concepts taken as the basis of a world view not existing at all tends to throw people off as they cannot shake the later ideas of fixed hard boarders and citizenship by blood. To their worldview there should be a fundamental traceable line to back before these distinct entities existed. It is the us vs them line to many.
Their ideas of ethnicity are fundamentally lies which while old aren't as old as they claim to be. People tend to freak out when foundational beliefs are revealed to be lies regardless of how innocous - see the reaction to imaginary numbers, non-Euclidian geometry not only being proposed but proven to be real and the legendary Pythagorean freak out over pi proving that not all numbers are rational.
People from the Nordics had trade relations with Southern Europe and Asia all the way back in the bronze age. Alas, records are vague at best, but there's definitely reason to believe there was an influx of people and ideas from the Black Sea area before and during the migration period, just a few hundred years before the viking raids and Norse settlements all over Europe.
And as if that wasn't enough, the Norse were quite infamous for taking captured women as wives and they also took slaves from the peoples they raided. Those people didn't just dissapear from the gene record.
Using a PCA to prove an intrinsic point about ethnicity is as laughable as it gets. You're aware the vectors in a PCA are just linear combinations of the observed features, right? You're just staring at the same data a different way.
But of course I didn't expect any less from someone who quotes Slate Star Codex of all sources to prove a point.
> You're aware the vectors in a PCA are just linear combinations of the observed features, right?
Yes, I am. Do you have a reason to think that means PCA is bad at representing similarity and kinship because of this?
As for the Slate Star Codex source - that wasn't to prove anything, just to define the "weak man" term. I would have used "straw man", but then you'd dig up some idiot that genuinely believes whatever it is you're debunking as proof that it's not a straw man.
>Do you have a reason to think that means PCA is bad at representing similarity and kinship because of this?
I suggest you read up on the definition of "distance" and "similarity" before drinking the PCA kool-aid. You don't get to define an ad hoc distance just because it fits your ideas about ethnicity. But then, I only have the popgen community to back me up on this. What do you have?
>As for the Slate Star Codex source - that wasn't to prove anything, just to define the "weak man" term.
SSC, providing ammunition to online HBD proponents since 2013.
There's nothing ad hoc about it - PCA is an extremely fundamental statistical tool, and commonly used in genetics, especially to evaluate population structure. A few random examples:
And I know what intrinsic means, but I don't know what an "intrinsic point" is supposed to be, or what makes my point "intrinsic", as opposed to just a regular point.
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.