Thursday, March 28

Why the Vikings weren’t really like many of us imagine them


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  • BBC News World

A blond viking

Image source, Getty Images

Caption,

The genes of the Vikings reveal that they were not as we imagined them.

Popular culture often depicts the Vikings as fierce warriors, with blond hair and blue eyes, who sailed the sea looting coastal towns.

But new scientific studies have debunked this modern myth that they were “purebred.”

An international group of evolutionary geneticists achieved examine genetic ancestry of these famous Germanic warriors, and came to surprising conclusions about their ethnic diversity.

“It all started when we succeeded in sequencing the first ancient human genome,” Danish evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev, a professor at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, told BBC Reel.


www.bbc.com

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