Ancient DNA sheds light on Viking origins, travels

When authors compared those genomes to each other and to hundreds of published genomes from modern people, they found subtle differences that sorted Scandinavian people into four groups, which closely resembled people now living in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the British Isles.A closer look at some of those differences offers some hints about how people in northern Europe may have moved around and interacted just before the start of the Viking Age. Archeologists and historians are still debating what caused seafarers in several places at once to take up raiding. That suggests the flow of people and their genes from the south and east, moving across the Baltic Sea and into Sweden and Denmark just before the Viking Age.That doesn’t tell us a tremendous amount on its own, but enough tiny puzzle pieces like this one will eventually be enough to at least suggest what the complete picture might look like.Because Margaryan and his colleagues included genomes from people who lived and died centuries before the Viking Age, it’s possible to track how genetic diversity changes over time in certain places. People sailing from Sweden mostly went east; people from Norway mostly went to western Europe and across the Atlantic to Ireland, the Isle of Man, and eventually to Iceland and Greenland; people from Denmark mostly went to England.Of course, the story is always a little more complex than it seems; Margaryan and his colleagues found a person with Danish ancestry in what’s now Russia, and Norwegians were among people executed (possibly for raiding) in early medieval England.“It is likely that many such individuals were from communities with mixed ancestries, thrown together by complex trading, raiding, and settlement networks that crossed cultures and the continent,” wrote Margaryan and his colleagues.