Genetic ancestry of the Scandinavian Vikings

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Scientists have deciphered the DNA of the ancient Vikings and found that they are the descendants of two groups of people - immigrants from Central Europe and residents of the north of modern Russia and the Baltic states, who migrated to Scandinavia about 10 thousand years ago, according to an article published in the journal PLoS Biology.

“We found that already 10 thousand years ago, when Scandinavia was just freed from ice, two groups of migrants entered its territory at once. These migrations were repeated many times later - at the end of the Stone Age, at the beginning of the Bronze Age and after the emergence of civilization. have almost nothing to do with the first inhabitants of the peninsula, - said Mattias Jacobson (Mattias Jacobson) from the University of Uppsala (Sweden).

According to scientists today, the first modern people penetrated the territory of Europe about 45-40 thousand years ago, traveling in several ways - through the Balkans, the islands of the Mediterranean Sea and moving along the coast of Africa towards Spain. The traces of these first humans, in the form of artifacts from the Aurignacian and Gravetian cultures, preserved in caves in southern France and northern Italy, helped scientists figure out what these people looked like and find hints as to why they "beat" the Neanderthals in the competition.

The first inhabitants of Europe, whose traces almost completely disappeared from the DNA of modern Europeans, did not populate the entire subcontinent - almost all of its northern regions, including Britain, northern Russia and Scandinavia, were covered with ice until relatively recently and were not suitable for human life. … Only 17-15 thousand years ago, when the ice receded for the last time, the north became accessible to its first inhabitants.

Jakobson and his colleagues deciphered the DNA of the allegedly first inhabitants of Scandinavia, whose remains were buried on the western coast of Norway, on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea and in the Stura-Karlsø nature reserve approximately 6-9 thousand years ago.

Thanks to the low temperatures and permafrost, fragments of DNA have been preserved unusually well in their bones, which has helped scientists to restore the genomes of their owners with almost the same accuracy that is available to the genetic material of modern humans.

As a result, paleogenetics counted not only the "female" mitochondrial DNA and the "male" Y chromosome, but also found about 10 thousand small mutations in the rest of their genome. This made it possible to very accurately calculate the age of the remains, reveal their pedigree and find their modern relatives.

The results of their analysis surprised scientists extremely - it turned out that the inhabitants of the western part of modern Norway were much closer in their DNA structure to the ancient inhabitants of the north of Russia and the Baltic states than to their neighbors living in the southern part of Scandinavia. Their genomes, in turn, were similar to the genetic material of hunter-gatherers who lived at that time in Germany and other regions of Central Europe.

Scientists suggest that this is due to the fact that in Scandinavia at that time lived two separate populations of ancient "Vikings", one of which penetrated into the region from the south, moving through Denmark and the adjacent islands, and the second - from the east, moving along the coast Norway. Interestingly, these first inhabitants of the peninsula, according to Jacobson and his colleagues, were extremely different from each other.

Southerners had the typical "European" appearance of that time - they had blue eyes and dark skin, while the northern "Vikings" were distinguished by fair skin and varied colors of eyes and hair. These differences are well combined with archaeological and paleochemical data suggesting that these people ate different foods and made completely different tools.

Traces of DNA from both groups of people have been preserved in the genomes of later inhabitants of Scandinavia, as well as of its modern inhabitants. This suggests that they were not isolated from each other and periodically came into contact, exchanging DNA. As scientists suggest, such an exchange helped their common descendants adapt to life in the harsh north of Europe and maintain a high level of genetic diversity, which is not observed in other regions of the subcontinent.