DNA: Viking he-man was a she

For more than a century after it was found, a skeleton ensconced in a Viking grave, surrounded by military weapons, was assumed to be that of a battle-hardened male. No more.

The warrior was, in fact, female. And not just any female, but a Viking warrior woman, a shieldmaiden, like an ancient Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of the Dragons from “Game of Thrones.”

The artifacts entombed with the 1,000-year-old bones and unearthed in 1889 in Birka, Sweden, included two shields, a sword, an ax, a spear, armor-piercing arrows and a battle knife — not to mention the remnants of two horses.

Such weapons of war among grave goods, archaeologists long assumed, meant the Viking had been male.

Yet modern-day genetics testing on the DNA extracted from a tooth and an arm bone has confirmed otherwise. The skeleton, known as Bj 581, belonged to someone with two X chromosomes.

“We were blinded by the warrior equipment,” one of the researchers, Anders Gotherstrom, said in an email to The Washington Post last week. “The grave-goods shout ‘warrior’ at you, and nothing else.”

Gotherstrom, along with nine other scientists from the Universities of Stockholm and Uppsala, announced the results in a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Theirs is the first genetic proof at least some Viking women were warriors.

The shieldmaiden, whose teeth identify her as at least 30, also appeared to be of high status. Her grave is on a prominent, elevated piece of ground between the town and a hilltop fort, and also contained a full set of gaming pieces and a gaming board, typically used by military leaders to work out battle strategy.

Although some weapons have been found in other female Viking graves, none included only weapons — or so many of them.

“This is exactly what you would expect from male warrior graves,” said Cat Jarman, a British archaeologist not associated with the discovery. “There’s nothing that says it was a woman ... [The contents] were not exactly domestic.”