NOT all Vikings were from Scandinavia, not all of them were blonde, and up to 6% of the UK population may have Viking DNA in their genes, a new study suggests.
DNA sequencing of more than 400 Viking skeletons from archaeological sites scattered across Europe and Greenland has shed new light on what we know about them.
Professor Eske Willerslev, director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen, led the study.
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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 that it wasn’t that kind of world.”
The findings, published in Nature, showed that Vikings were not just Scandinavian in their ancestry, but had DNA from Southern Europe and Asia. This happened before and during the Viking Age.
The research team also found that Pictish people became Vikings without genetically mixing with Scandinavians.
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