UK has six percent Viking blood

[guy]

A mass grave of around 50 headless Vikings from a site in Dorset, UK. Some of these remains were used for DNA analysis. Credit: Dorset County Council/Oxford Archaeology

 

Reassessing 400 Viking skeletons found in Europe and Greenland by DNA analysis have uncovered interesting findings:

 

 

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• 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 close family members.
• The genetic legacy in the UK has left the population with up to six per cent Viking DNA. 

 

I guess I was surprised to find six percent of the UK population has Viking blood compared to only ten percent in Sweden.

 

World’s largest-ever DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian | University of Cambridge

[caldrail]

Blonde hair and blue eyes are two mutations in human genetics dating to around thirty or forty thousand years ago.

Just a guess, but I  imagine Viking DNA is more prevalent in the northern half of Britain, where the Vikings had actually settled.

[Crispina]

Interesting.

[Elisa]

I used to live in York and what fascinated me was the amount of Scandinavian place-names in Yorkshire. I thought that an ending in -by or -thorpe implied the existence of a Scandinavian settlement, but apparently there are some problems with this:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/esharp/issues/2/yokota/
 

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Some scholars believe that great frequency of place-names with -by and -thorp in the Danelaw presupposes an abundant existence of people who spoke Scandinavian languages and that they consequently show the main areas of the Scandinavian settlement. This opinion should be handled with caution, however, because not all of those place-names can be regarded as a direct result of Scandinavian migration.

 

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One of the primary elements of confusion regarding place names is that by continued to be a productive nominal element until at least the twelfth century in certain districts.