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Vikings may have been mob men who travel with their married woman to raw country , agree to a young field of ancient Viking DNA .
Maternal DNA from ancient Norsemen intimately matches that of modern - day people in the North Atlantic islet , particularly from the Orkney and Shetland Islands .
A Viking boat at Lewirk, Shetland Island
The finding suggest that bothVikingmen and women sailed on the ships to colonise new state . The fresh study also challenge the popular concept of Vikings as glorified hoodlum with telling seafaring attainment . [ Fierce paladin : 7 Secrets of Viking Men ]
" It overthrows this nineteenth century approximation that the Vikings were just raider and pillagers , " said study co - author Erika Hagelberg , an evolutionary life scientist at the University of Oslo in Norway . " They established settlements and grew crop , and barter was very , very authoritative . "
Vikings moderate a special place in folklore as male warriors who terrorized the coasts of France , England and Germany for three centuries . But the Vikings were much more than pirates and spoiler . They established far - flung trade routes , reached the shores of present - day America , settled in new lands and even founded the mod city of Dublin , which was scream Dyfflin by the Vikings .
Some early genic study have suggested thatViking male traveled aloneand then brought local women along when they settle in a fresh location . For instance , a 2001 study published in theAmerican Journal of Human Geneticssuggested that Norse men fetch Gaelic women over when they colonized Iceland .
Modern antecedent
To determine more about Norse colonization patterns , Hagelberg and her colleagues extracted teeth and shaved off low wedges of recollective bones from 45 Norse skeleton that were dated to between A.D. 796 and A.D. 1066 . The skeletons were first excavate in various locations around Norway and are now housed in the Schreiner Collection at the University of Oslo .
The team looked at DNA carried in the mitochondria , the vigour powerhouses of the jail cell . Because mitochondria are housed in the cytoplasm of a woman ’s eggs , they are make it on from a char to her children and can therefore reveal maternal lineage . The squad compared that textile with mitochondrial desoxyribonucleic acid from 5,191 people from across Europe , as well as with previously analyzed sample from 68 ancient Icelanders .
The ancient Norse and Icelandic genetic fabric close matched the enatic deoxyribonucleic acid in innovative North Atlantic people , such as Swedes , Scots and the English . But the ancient Norse seemed most intimately tie in to people from Orkney and Shetland Islands , Scottish islesthat are quite close to Scandinavia .
Mixed mathematical group
" It look like womanhood were a more significant part of the colonization process compare to what was believed earlier , " say Jan Bill , an archeologist and the curator of theViking burying shipcollection at the Museum of Cultural History , a part of the University of Oslo .
That lines up with diachronic documents , which suggest that Norse men , charwoman and children — but also Scots , British and Irish family line — colonized far - flung island such as Iceland , Bill say Live Science . Bill was not involved with the raw study .
" This picture that we have of Viking raiding — a circle of long ships foray — there obviously would not be house on that kind of ship , " Bill say . " But when these raiding bodily process started to become a more lasting affair , then at some head you may really see families are traveling along and stay in the camps . "
As a follow - up , the team would like to equate ancient Norse DNA to ancient deoxyribonucleic acid from Britain , Scotland and the North Atlantic Isles , to get a better facial expression at exactly how all these mass are related , Hagelberg said .
The findings were published today ( Dec. 7 ) in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
