How Viking legacy is still among us...
NOT all Vikings were from Scandinavia, not all were blond and up to six per cent of Britons may have their DNA in their genes.
Researchers said the results of a six- year project debunk the modern image of them as brutal predators who travelled by sea to pillage their way across Europe and beyond.
DNA sequencing of more than 400 Viking skeletons from archaeological sites scattered across Europe and Greenland has shed fresh light on what we know about them.
Trading
Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen, led the study.
He said: “We have this image of well- connected Vikings mixing with each other, trading and going on raiding parties to fight kings across Europe because this is what we see on television and read in books.
“But genetically we have shown for the first time kind of world.
“This study changes the perception of who a Viking actually was – no one could have predicted these significant gene flows into Scandinavia from southern Europe and Asia happened before and during the Viking Age.”
According to the research published in Nature, the genetic legacy lives on with six per cent of the UK thought to have Viking DNA, compared to 10 per cent in Sweden.
Prof Willerslev said: “The results change the perception of who a Viking actually was. The history books will need to be updated.”
Professor Martin Sikora, a lead author of the paper and an associate professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics, said: “We found Vikings weren’t just Scandinavians in their genetic ancestry, as we analysed genetic influences in their DNA from southern Europe and Asia. Many Vikings have high levels of nonScandinavian ancestry, which suggest ongoing gene flow across Europe.” that it wasn’t that