Free Republic

...cutting-edge DNA sequencing of more than 400 Viking skeletons from archaeological sites scattered across Europe and Greenland will rewrite the history books as it has shown:Skeletons from famous Viking burial sites in Scotland were actually local people who could have taken on Viking identities and were buried as Vikings.Many Vikings actually had brown hair not blonde hair.Viking identity was not limited to people with Scandinavian genetic ancestry. The study shows the genetic history of Scandinavia was influenced by foreign genes from Asia and Southern Europe before the Viking Age.Early Viking Age raiding parties were an activity for locals and included...

Vikings Live: a tour from the British Museum | Premiered May 27, 2020 | The British Museum

For the better part of four centuries, Greenland's southern coast defined the westernmost edge of Viking occupation. Seduced by visions of verdant hills and fertile ground, in the late 10th century waves of Norse migrants set sail in hopes of an easier life abroad. At its peak, the colony's population numbered in the thousands, spread out across three major settlements. And then it ended. No word of hardship. No record of struggle. By the middle of the 15th century, the Norse experiment in Greenland was a bust. New research suggests we might have had it all wrong about the prime...

"Echoes of History: Ragnarök" is a historical podcast inspired by the video game "Assassin’s Creed Valhalla : Dawn of Ragnarök." It’s the second season of Ubisoft’s popular podcast “Echoes of History."The year 1066 has become indelibly linked to William the Conqueror, the Norman King who by his victory at Hastings seized the English throne. But for every event that becomes gilded in history as a turning point, there were thousands of others overshadowed, and one such event happened only weeks before that fateful battle and involved the same English King, but instead of securing everlasting glory, it ended the career...

First large-scale study of ancient feline DNA charts domestication in Near East and Egypt and the global spread of house cats. Thousands of years before cats came to dominate Internet culture, they swept through ancient Eurasia and Africa carried by early farmers, ancient mariners and even Vikings, finds the first large-scale look at ancient-cat DNA. The study, presented at a conference on 15 September, sequenced DNA from more than 200 cats that lived between about 15,000 years ago and the eighteenth century ad. Researchers know little about cat domestication, and there is active debate over whether the house cat (Felis...

Archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) have uncovered two objects in Oslo inscribed with Norse runic text.Excavations were being conducted in Oslo’s Medieval Park ‘Middelalderparken’ in what was once the southern part of the medieval city of Oslo. The park contains the ruins of St. Clement’s Church, St. Mary’s Church, and the former Oslo Kongsgård estate royal estate.Researchers discovered a bone inscribed in Norse and a piece of wood with inscriptions on three sides in both Norse and Latin.Professor Kristel Zilmer from the University of Oslo, who specialises in writing culture (runology) and iconography has studied...

The Faroe Islands, a North Atlantic archipelago between Norway and Iceland, were settled by Viking explorers in the mid-9th century CE. However, several indirect lines of evidence suggest earlier occupation of the Faroes by people from the British Isles. Here, we present sedimentary ancient DNA and molecular fecal biomarker evidence from a lake sediment core proximal to a prominent archaeological site in the Faroe Islands to establish the earliest date for the arrival of people in the watershed. Our results reveal an increase in fecal biomarker concentrations and the first appearance of sheep DNA at 500 CE (95% confidence interval...

A Viking sword found at a burial site in Orkney is a rare, exciting and complex artefact, say archaeologists.The find, made in 2015 on the northeast coast of Papa Westray, is being carefully examined as part of post-excavation work.Archaeologists have now identified it as a type of heavy sword associated with the 9th Century.The relic is heavily corroded, but x-rays have revealed the sword's guards to be highly decorated.Contrasting metals are thought to have been used to create a honey comb-like pattern.The remains of a scabbard, a sheath for the blade, was also found...The excavations at Mayback revealed a number...

An international team of researchers has found evidence that people lived on islands in the Azores archipelago approximately 700 years earlier than prior evidence has shown. In their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of sediment cores taken from lakes on some of the islands in the archipelago.Due to the absence of other evidence, historians have believed that people first arrived in the Azores in 1427, when Portuguese sailor Diogo de Silves landed on Santa Maria Island. Soon thereafter, others from Portugal arrived and made the archipelago their home. In this...

THAT VIKINGS crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals...

1957, was donated to Yale in the 1960s where it immediately came under a great deal of suspicion and intrigue. Alleged to date back to the 15th-Century, the map depicts 'Vinlanda Insula' - a section of North America's coastline. It also claims that the region was visited by Europeans in the 11th Century. Despite appearing outwardly genuine, the map has been mired in controversy ever since it first appeared. Previous studies have indicated the presence of modern ink on its parchment, however it wasn't until Yale researchers were able to apply modern tools and techniques that it was possible to...

Viking Cats – DNA Study Shows the Crucial Role Felines Played in Viking Life Apr 12, 2019 Reginald Martyr After conducting extensive research, scientists believe that they have stumbled upon an interesting revelation concerning the history of cats, a species which is among the world’s most popular pets today. New findings suggest that eons before cats became household pets across the globe, they were the frequent companions of ancient Vikings, in some cases accompanying them as they sailed across the globe. The first-ever major examination and analysis of ancient DNA from our feline friends provided these rather unexpected preliminary conclusions...

New detailed surveys of Viking age ship settings in Hjarnø, Denmark have been completed by archaeologists examining the origins and makeup of the Kalvestene grave field, a renowned site in Scandinavian folklore.The archaeologists from Flinders University conducted detailed surveys to determine whether a 17th century illustration of the site completed by the famous Enlightenment antiquarian, Ole Worm, was accurate, as part of the first survey since the National Museum of Denmark discovered and restored 10 tombs on a small island off the eastern coast almost a century ago.The burial site is made up of monuments that, according to legend, commemorate...

The cave is located by a volcano that erupted almost 1,100 years ago...Archaeological work shows that after the lava cooled, the Vikings entered the cave and constructed a boat-shaped structure made out of rocks. Within this structure, the Vikings would have burned animal bones, including those of sheep, goat, cattle, horses and pigs, at high temperatures as a sacrifice...Near the structure, archaeologists discovered 63 beads, three of which came from Iraq, said Kevin Smith, deputy director and chief curator of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, who leads the team excavating the cave. The team also found remains...

Melting glacier sheds light upon hidden Viking era artifacts in Norway dated back to 300 AD The tremendous melting of the glaciers resulted in some recent archaeological discoveries revealing several well preserved historical objects, and one of these remarkable finds is the discoveries of artifacts from the Viking era on the hills that were once used for transportation purposes dated back to 300 A.D. as per the study. More glacial melt, although a disturbing factor of a much larger global warming effect, has provided ample shreds of evidence and remains of the age-old objects for today’s generation advantageously. Artifacts from...

...the research team extracted and analysed DNA from the remains of 442 men, women and children... from archaeological sites in Scandinavia, the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, and mostly date to the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050 AD). The team's analyses yielded a number of findings. One of the most noteworthy is that contrary to what has often been assumed, Viking identity was not limited to people of Scandinavian ancestry -- the team discovered that two skeletons from a Viking burial site in the Orkney Islands were of Scottish ancestry. They also found evidence that there was...

It is now generally accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland across the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent almost a thousand years ago, but what happened in this vast area during the next five hundred years has long been a source of disagreement among scholars. Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait. The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields...

A corroded, damaged helmet unearthed in Yarm, Stockton-on-Tees, in the 1950s is a rare, 10th century Anglo-Scandinavian helmet, the first ever found in Britain and only the second nearly complete Viking helmet found in the world. **** The hammer marks covering the surface and ragged edges of the infill plates show the helmet was made at a blacksmiths forge without benefit of additional refinement. The rivet holes were punched through hot metal from the outer side, ensuring a smooth exterior that would not catch bladed weapons. The out turned lip of the brow band was a later alteration, pushing the...

Scientists have discovered extinct strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons - proving for the first time that the killer disease plagued humanity for at least 1400 years. Smallpox spread from person to person via infectious droplets, killed around a third of sufferers and left another third permanently scarred or blind. Around 300 million people died from it in the 20th century alone before it was officially eradicated in 1980 through a global vaccination effort - the first human disease to be wiped out... He said: "We discovered new strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons...

Archaeologists have unearthed what could potentially be the oldest Viking settlement in Iceland. It's an ancient longhouse that is reckoned to have been built in around 800 AD, which is decades earlier than the Vikings were thought to have colonised that part of the world. Oh, and it was found beneath another slightly less old longhouse that was packed with treasure, according to archaeologist Bjarni Einarsson, who was in charge of the excavations at the site. He told Live Science that the longhouse above was probably that of a chieftain, saying: "The younger hall is the richest in Iceland so...