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It depends when in the historical record you look. The Vikings didn't just raid, they settled. Dublin, York, and Kyiv were all Viking cities. Early Scandinavian

by ng12 6y ago

It depends when in the historical record you look. The Vikings didn't just raid, they settled. Dublin, York, and Kyiv were all Viking cities. Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde, as their influence grew so did their genetic pool.

wahern 6y ago
Not all Scandinavian populations had blonde hair. I know a blonde person of unmistakable Scandinavian extraction who, it turns out, possesses a Y chromosome haplogroup from Northern China, presumably inherited via the Sami or a similar herding society that moved across Siberia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people AFAIU, because of how the inheritance traits for hair and eye color work, a population could have a relatively persistent fraction of people exhibiting non-typical phenotypes for some time even with a temporary infusion of alleles, not to mention regular contact. In general, people got around more than one might think. The Inuit reached Greenland shortly after the Vikings from the opposite direction; both ended up displacing the existing inhabitants. The Age of the Vikings is pretty much modern times in terms of speed of migration and population mixing; not much different from today as compared to when many stereotypical phenotypes originally arose.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde, as their influence grew so did their genetic pool. By the early Scandinavian Viking era, Germanic-speaking peoples had been carrying out raids to the east and southeast for centuries, and bringing back slaves. Even the earliest Vikings were not as “pure” a population as you imagine.
goto11 6y ago
> Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde No. Recent DNA analysis on Viking-age burials (as alluded to in the article) has laid this myth to rest.

by ng12 6y ago

wahern 6y ago

Not all Scandinavian populations had blonde hair. I know a blonde person of unmistakable Scandinavian extraction who, it turns out, possesses a Y chromosome haplogroup from Northern China, presumably inherited via the Sami or a similar herding society that moved across Siberia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people AFAIU, because of how the inheritance traits for hair and eye color work, a population could have a relatively persistent fraction of people exhibiting non-typical phenotypes for some time even with a temporary infusion of alleles, not to mention regular contact. In general, people got around more than one might think. The Inuit reached Greenland shortly after the Vikings from the opposite direction; both ended up displacing the existing inhabitants. The Age of the Vikings is pretty much modern times in terms of speed of migration and population mixing; not much different from today as compared to when many stereotypical phenotypes originally arose.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde, as their influence grew so did their genetic pool. By the early Scandinavian Viking era, Germanic-speaking peoples had been carrying out raids to the east and southeast for centuries, and bringing back slaves. Even the earliest Vikings were not as “pure” a population as you imagine.

goto11 6y ago

> Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde No. Recent DNA analysis on Viking-age burials (as alluded to in the article) has laid this myth to rest.