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‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)
- barrenko 9mo agoThe OG founders.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 9mo agoI suspect this is an example of us seeing history through a mdoern lens and making false assumptions. For example, the idea that a nation project or an empire is genetically homogenous is a relatively modern concept. The truth is that empires incorporated various ethnic groups and those ethnic groups survived for long periods of time. The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized. The British Empire spanned the globe. In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages. Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
- eightysixfour 9mo ago> Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so. I think this is the articles point. We would not consider being Roman a job, but we would consider being a Legionary a job. The article is arguing “Viking” is more “Legionary” than “Roman.”
- QuercusMax 9mo agoThe entire point of the article is that they called themselves collectively Norsemen. Going 'viking' (raiding) was an activity done by 'vikings' (raiders).
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 9mo agoI feel like this is common in most (at least western) empires. Vikings from Sweden would take over territory as far as Poland or even Italy and recruit new soldiers. Eventually some of them would end up in warrior style graves. What's actually more interesting in my mind is that they didn't bring people back, and so the gene pool in Sweden remained more or less unchanged
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- paleotrope 9mo agoThe slave trade only went south.
- ecshafer 9mo agoI am not sure why they used this title for this study as that is not the important part. We already have known Viking was a job description, thats been known for hundreds of years. We also knew that viking settlement was widespread. This study used DNA sequencing to settle the debate on if vikings from certain areas went to certain areas, and if they mixed. It seems to confirm the theory that the norse did NOT mix, and traded, raided and settled different areas separately.
- jsdkkdkdkedj 9mo ago[flagged]
- beloch 9mo agoThe title is indeed odd. The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agomaybe you hate your neighbors more than you hate the exotic foreign visitor? hmm, of course current news would rather undermine that theory, but maybe today's exotic foreign countries are about as close as neighboring countries were back in Viking times.
- beloch 9mo agoIt's a distasteful, but relevant, aspect of vikings that they were slavers as well as raiders. If you went viking, a large part of the booty you brought back walked on two legs and had genes to pass on. Perhaps the Norse liked their neighbours just enough not to make many of them "visitors".
- efskap 9mo ago[flagged]
- lazide 9mo agoPfft, ICE agents wish they were pirates. In other parts of the world, plenty of people romanticize ancestry with Ghenghis Khan too. Everyone loves being seen to be on the ‘winning’ side sometimes, (and there is always a counter-culture minority!) and when sufficiently remote in time, no one is going to really ‘feel’ the atrocities. Then it’s all about marketing and current social whims. If the Nazi’s won, the current 80/20 pro/anti ratio would be flipped no question. You don’t have to go very far back in history to see that humans have some pretty dark tendencies.
- givemeethekeys 9mo ago> rather than Scandinavian Strange, being in North America, I've yet to meet anyone identify themself as having viking blood, but we refer to Scandinavians as being of viking ancestry all the time.
- aaronbrethorst 9mo agoI grew up in Minnesota and have literally never heard anyone ever say this about me or any other person of Scandinavian origin.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoYou've never heard of your NFL football team?
- Revanche1367 9mo agoSport team names have nothing to do with declaring ancestry.
- aaronbrethorst 9mo agoThis is not the zinger you think it is, my dude.
- kleton 9mo agoIt's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.
- philwelch 9mo agoBy 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider. I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
- kleton 9mo ago> Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way So they were indeed Vikings as a matter of heredity?
- philwelch 9mo ago“Viking” isn’t a matter of heredity though. If your grandfather was a bricklayer, you’re not a bricklayer as a matter of heredity, you have to actually lay bricks. Likewise, if your grandfather was a viking, you have to actually go raiding and pillaging to be one yourself. Which is not something you’re likely to do if the king of France gave your grandfather an entire duchy in exchange for a promise to stop doing that sort of thing.
- hinkley 9mo ago99%. Poor Sven just liked maps but they kept making him come along on their “excursions”.
- bitwize 9mo agoWhat's gonna bake your noodle is, Viking raids were the VC-funded startups of medieval northern Europe. Norse kings were very generous with their kingdom's treasure, to the raiders with the most fearsome reputations.
- coldtea 9mo agoIt was both.
- ghostoftiber 9mo agoThe answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.
- hinkley 9mo ago“Make the tall girl join the women’s basketball/volleyball team.”
- philwelch 9mo agoThis piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on. It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
- acadapter 9mo agoIt is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/wey%E1%B8%B1- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.
- theMMaI 9mo agoThe first part of the word viking, or vik simply means "bay" in nordic languages
- BurningFrog 9mo agoThe even firster part "vi" means "we" though.
- b3nt-fiber 9mo agowebay hmm. they started a trend
- runarberg 9mo agoI don’t think -kingur is a suffix in old norse. It is not a suffix in modern Icelandic, and I can’t think of any suffix like that. In fact I don‘t remember a suffix which attaches to a pronoun. In modern Icelandic at least we like to introduce more pronouns or conjugate them rather then to suffix or prefix them. If the word was broken as vi-kingur, I think the modern Icelandic would be við-kingur (or við-lingur), which is simply not a word in the language.
- DrewADesign 9mo agoAnd vi was an outgrowth of ex, which was an improved version of ed, which in my experience, roughly translates to ‘ugh’.
- BobBagwill 9mo ago
- jibal 9mo agoNever trust the headline. From the article: > And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
- bazoom42 9mo agoThe article is just really confused in its terminology. But historically, vikingr meant raider or pirate. It was only hereditary in the sense it might be a family tradition to go viking. But if you dont go raiding you are not a vikingr whatever your ancestry.
- jeltz 9mo agoYeah, and the Norse also called non-norse raiders Vikings. It was just a word meaning raider or pirate.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bazoom42 9mo agoThe title is rather confused, because DNA cannot show how people understood a certain word. Historical sources like the sagas show how the word was understood.
- danilocesar 9mo agoAnd they didn't use emacs, because they were Vi-Kings
- enjoykaz 9mo agoThe no-mixing part is what got me. If "viking" was just a job open to anyone, you'd expect genetic mixing in the burial sites. But Swedish groups went east, Danes south, Norwegians west — distinct genetic clusters throughout. So it was a job, but one you apparently got by being born in the right place
- bazoom42 9mo agoDon’t take “job” literally. It wasn’t centralized in any way. It just meant if you had the resources you could build a ship, hire some henchmen, and go raiding. It is not surprising Swedes went East, Nowegians Northwest etc - just look at a map.
- Bender 9mo ago[flagged]
- IncreasePosts 9mo agoSo Africans have the raping gene but Scandinavians do not?
- Bender 9mo agoRape is an act, not a gene. Genes can show where each ethnic groups travel however acts of rape in some countries are often unreported or under-reported for political or religious reasons. Many countries do not track the ethnicity of the attacker. Some cultures permit rape if the victim is not of the same religion but there we would delve into rather taboo topics as rarely discussed without emotion by western cultures.
- IncreasePosts 9mo agoI understand that - I was referring to how OP said "Scandinavians evolved away" from that
- nillkiggers1488 9mo ago[flagged]
- bazoom42 9mo agoIf you are referring to the “Vikings”-show, you should be aware it is fiction and the roles sadly are played by professional actors, not genuine vikings.
- giraffe_lady 9mo agoLook at that user's handle please.
- nillkiggers1488 9mo ago[dead]
- VikingCoder 9mo agoWell said.
- geodel 9mo agoI don't believe in it. Tomorrow they will say Software developer was just a job and they were not intellectually superior race who brought alien technology like NodeJS.
- shevy-java 9mo agoSo who are vikings? I think the two most common answers are "people before in Denmark" or "people before in Norway". There may not be an easy distinction here the more we step back into history, but personally I am leaning more towards the "old danes". It just seems to fit more.
- pamcake 9mo agoThat's a misconception TFA is talking about.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9mo ago"Farming is hard, let's go viking"
- bazoom42 9mo agoNo, vikingr is an old norse word meaning pirate, raider, or outlaw. Not everyone in the Nordics were vikings, just like not ever American were a cowboy.
- Bender 9mo agoFrom old Norse a viking is a pirate or raider often including rape.