What is the Genetic Legacy of the Vikings on Europe?
Channel: Celtic History Decoded
Date: 30/03/2024

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What is the Genetic Legacy of the Vikings on Europe?

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:14 Who Actually Were the Vikings?
1:54 The Genetic Legacy of the Vikings
4:11 The Problem: Anglo-Saxon or Viking? 
6:17  The Genetic Legacy Continued 

What is the genetic legacy of the Vikings and could you have a percentage of Viking DNA in your ancestry? I know I probably do given that I’m Scottish, but the Vikings genetic legacy extends far and wide across Europe.  

But firstly, what does Viking actually mean? Now we often refer to the Vikings today like they were some unified, cohesive empire. Although later in the Viking Age, we saw more organised political structures like the North Sea Empire that unified the crowns of England, Norway and Denmark in the 11th century AD, the Vikings is a somewhat loose term, and implies as much the action of raiding by sea rather than a fully unified group. 

Yet that are some major traits that give us a framework to work from. Cambridge dictionary defines a Viking as “a person belonging to a race of Scandinavian people who travelled by sea and attacked parts of northern and southern Europe between the 8th and the 11th centuries, often staying to live in places they travelled to.” The Vikings were mainly men originally from the Scandinavian countries that we call Norway, Sweden and Denmark today. Particularly in the early phases of the Viking Age, there seemed to be a large separation between the three areas, with only limited contact between them. 

As well as exploring large parts of Europe, reaching as far afield as parts of modern Russia and Turkey, they also reached the Americas. They built the settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, an eastern island of the coast of Canada. The Vikings clearly loved exploring and gradually expanded their foothold in the North Atlantic, creating new Viking bases of operation. Leif Erikson for instance, a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus, was born in Iceland and died in Greenland. His father, Erik the Red, is considered the first European to settle Greenland. 

Now we have a good overview, what is the genetic legacy of the Vikings on Europe? As well as obviously still having a strong presence in modern Scandinavian populations, the Vikings left their mark on various populations across Europe. A fascinating study that was published in Nature in 2020 looked at the Population genomics of the Viking world. 

Sources:

Margaryan, A., Lawson, D.J., Sikora, M. et al. Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature 585, 390–396 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8 Population genomics of the Viking world | Nature 

Settlers: Genetics, Geography and the Peopling of Britain - Oxford University Museum of Natural History - http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/settlers/
 
Oxford University Museum of Natural History - Genetic Ancestry and the People of the British Isles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8k9LMaFeRM&t=1s 

University of Oxford - Who do you think you really are? A genetic map of the British Isles https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-really-are-genetic-map-british-isles 

University of Oxford - People of the British Isles - Population Genetics and Facial Genetics https://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/ https://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/population-genetics 

Viking | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary 

Vikings Vikings - Wikipedia 

North Sea Empire North Sea Empire - Wikipedia 

Danelaw Danelaw - Wikipedia 

#vikings #history #ancestry