Posted on 03/12/2010 5:09:48 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
London, England (CNN) -- They were 51 young men who met a grisly death far from home, their heads chopped off and their bodies thrown into a mass grave.
Their resting place was unknown until last year, when workers excavating for a road near the London 2012 Olympic sailing venue in Weymouth, England, unearthed the grave. But questions remained about who the men were, how long they had been there and why they had been decapitated.
On Friday, officials revealed that analysis of the men's teeth shows they were Vikings, executed with sharp blows to the head around a thousand years ago. They were killed during the Dark Ages, when Vikings frequently invaded the region.
"To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development," said David Score, project manager for Oxford Archaeology, which excavated the remains. "Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual and presents an incredible opportunity to learn more about what is happening in Dorset at this time."
Radiocarbon dating had already placed the remains between A.D. 890 and 1030, before the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Kitties?
Hope not.
Ah, life was so idyllic back then.
Strontium isotope composition of teeth and other skeletal elements can be used to identify the geographic region that an animal or human inhabited, because different regions tend to have distinct Sr isotope compositions, and natural variations in the relative abundance of Sr isotopes are not changed as Sr is processed through the food chain. Therefore, an organism that ingests Sr from one region can have a Sr isotope composition that is different than that of an organism that ingests Sr from another region.
Vikings not only practices barbaric human sacrifice, they were one of the first to enthusiastically embrace Christianity.
People forget that people became Christian for a REASON... not only the person of Jesus Christ, it also freed them from horrible religions.
Weren’t Muslims around about that time.. and in fact were the cause for the Dark Ages.. Burning the Alexandria library etc.
Interesting.
Read.
Isotope analysis of teeth can reveal clues about a person’s drinking water, and in turn the climate they came from, said Jane Evans, an isotope geochemist at the survey.
“What we found was all of these guys came from a climate that had to be colder than Britain ... probably Sweden and Norway,”
So the Normans were French and not Vikings!
My bad!
Also found this article:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0203_060203_viking_teeth.html
Says that vikings filed their teeth for ‘beautification’. Not stated in the article being commented on, but interesting bit of information.
Aw....thank you so very, very, very much!
Looks like they had a particularly brutal orthodontists! Been there, done that. The ancient Maya used to file theirs to points, and inset turquoise and jade stones, just like our rap stars inset their teeth with diamonds.
sounds all fine and dandy but the article says one individual has the composition of someone from north of the arctic circle.
That’s BS! there’s never been vikings from north of the arctic! That’s saami land and eskimo land and samoyed land.
no vikings.
Whatever the story is, I'm sure it would be an interesting read. I'm wondering about them being somehow taken prisoner, and were executed all together. No heads found? would suggest the heads were sent someplace else. Someone sending a message I suppose?
I’m thinking they died in battle and someone dragged the dead to a pit afterwards to clean up the battle field. If you read the article, is states that they had multiple sword injuries throughout their bodies.
Strontium isotopes don’t lie. Maybe that non-Viking guy was tagging along with the Vikings. Occam’s Razor.
Ornamentation of teeth and body parts that we once viewed as primitive has become attractive as a “statement” today. I would have never thought it could be - growing up when we saw movies of primitive customs such as these we all pretty much looked at it as ignorant.
Hey, bringback, they were my ancestors too. I’m with you here. I don’t esp like that they were dug up, frankly, and I want MY reparations. I suspect they could tell they were Vikings because of the genetic material — ie the Berzerker Gene. Which is alive and well, is it not?
they had the teeth. Therefore they had the heads.
At the time this guy lived (probably 900 AD) the Vikings, meaning Old West Gothic speaking people, were just then learning to scale up the boat hull they'd discovered in Lapland ~ which made it possible to sail in Arctic and North Atlantic Waters in the open sea.
I'd say right off hand that the guy with the far North guy wasn't Indo-European at all ~ but rather was a Sa'ami
What that means to me is the folks doing the tooth analysis forgot they are dealing with a "race" which had been living separate from other Europeans in that region for about 15,000 years and had developed some rather striking differences.
Among them were the "teeth". A Finnish study found that Skolt Sa'ami were missing 18% of their adult teeth simply because they never formed. You can find several references to this under articles containing the expression"dental displasia". Seems to me that just counting teeth would have clued them in to that one individual's identity.
It's possible these studies haven't yet caught up to anthropologists though.
Next: large animal bones through the noses of people working at Starbucks and the Apple store.
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