Karin Bose: Old sheep’s feces reveal Viking myth

Men and women are descended from the earth. As American yoga fanatic and author John Gray put it in his best-selling book since 1992, Mars is neither male nor female in Venus.

In recent years, however, DNA research has shown that many ancient historical communities are dualistic.

When the first farmers It came to Europe 8,000 years ago and it happened The peasant women teamed up with hunters who already lived in the area. Rather than the other way around. For example, it happened in Lebensky Viril in present-day Serbia.

And they The Indo-European shepherds who migrated to Europe about 5,000 years ago were mostly men. They had children with local farming women.

In both cases, there were very different groups. First generation men and women should speak their own language, be incomprehensible to each other, and differ greatly in customs and practices.

Than today These encounters are reflected in the DNA of the Swedes now living. In the paternal line, the incoming Indo-Europeans are greatly dominated, and in the paternal line the lines are more mixed and further backward.

The same pattern was repeated during the Viking period. Of course, women from Scandinavia sometimes appeared on business trips and immigration trips. Some of them are mentioned by name in written sources. But men dominated.

Performances in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, among other things According to DNA results, the ancestral lines are from Scandinavia Maternal lines are more common in the British Isles. In part, this should be about what we call abduction today – abducted Irish slave women are mentioned in the literature.

But there are still explanations. For example, the Vikings were already overcrowded when they sailed in their boats.

That was the case in the Faroe Islands, according to a study published in the Journal this week Communications Earth and the environment.

Practical historical writing has so far provided that the Vikings came to the deserted islands in the ninth century.

Some researchers have tried to point out that the Faroe Islands may already have been inhabited. They have some traces, such as the DNA of modern populations, Celtic place names, occasional remnants of roasted barley, and written records of early monks from Ireland.

But there is no conclusive evidence of previous permanent residence.

Publishes now An American-Norwegian research team, using its first name, Laurel Kurt, analyzes DNA from sedimentary layers.

Extracting DNA directly from the earth is a completely new technology that has only begun to deliver reliable results in the last year.

After all, Laurel Curtin and her co-authors have discovered DNA from sheep feces. This feces shows that humans have been raising sheep on the Faroe Islands since the beginning of the fifth century. That is, three hundred and fifty years before the arrival of the Scandinavian Vikings.

Pollen and DNA show that plants have changed. For example, the incidence of birch and juniper shrubs in favor of open grazing lands is low.

Overall, the evidence shows The Faroe Islands have been inhabited since the beginning of the 5th century. Not a few male monks, but a potential population of males and females who have survived for 350 years.

The Scandinavian Vikings gained a foothold in the art of sailing until they landed in the middle of the ninth century.

It is unknown at this time what he did to cause the fire. But in the DNA of the current population in the Faroe Islands, no traces of surviving fathers have been found from previous populations.

Only men and more than eighty percent of Scandinavian women are British.

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