‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)

https://www.science.org/content/article/viking-was-job-description-not-matter-heredity-massive-ancient-dna-study-shows

by bookofjoe • 5 months ago

179 127 5 months ago

barrenko• 5 months ago

The OG founders.

jmyeet• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

The entire point of the article is that they called themselves collectively Norsemen. Going 'viking' (raiding) was an activity done by 'vikings' (raiders).

guywithahat• 5 months ago

I 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

paleotrope• 5 months ago

The slave trade only went south.

ecshafer• 5 months ago

I 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.

beloch2• 5 months ago

The 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.

bryanrasmussen2• 5 months ago

maybe 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.

vintermann10• 5 months ago

A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.

After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way.

But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time.

Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.

Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..."

Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.

groundzeros2015• 5 months ago

The used that title because more people will see and remember it.

tdb7893• 5 months ago

You say "we" knew but the vast majority of people don't. It's not exactly common knowledge among people I know so it's unsurprising a title for general audiences uses it as a hook.

jeltz2• 5 months ago

Scandinavians and historians? This study did not reveal anything which was not taught in school in Sweden in the 90s when I grew up. I guess useful to verify what we knew with even more sources, but there was no new discovery here.

libraryatnight• 5 months ago

I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.

lo_zamoyski4• 5 months ago

People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture.

It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.

coldtrait• 5 months ago

Many Americans who are Italian and Irish do the same thing.

JuniperMesos2• 5 months ago

This is accurate if their family ancestry is from the Nordic countries, Britain or Ireland, which is a substantial chunk of Northern Europe (although in the latter cases the heritage looked more like male Viking invaders taking non-Norse wives from among the people they conquered for hundreds of years in the Danelaw or similar).

More broadly, the Norse were among the last people in Europe to be converted to Christianity, and their particular pagan traditions lasted long enough to be recorded and preserved in some form by medieval Christian writers, in a way that was not true of other Germanic peoples who were Christianized much earlier. So there's a sense in which our modern understanding of the pre-Christian Norse worldview is a stand-in for what must've been a more widespread set of European pagan traditions that were wiped out by Christianity. An incomplete and limited stand-in, of course, as any serious scholar of that world will tell you; but it makes sense that modern white people who have an interest in what their own ancient, pagan history might've been like - or for that matter people who have a sincere problem with Western Christianity and are seeking some kind of alternative spirituality - might look to the Norse world with interest, even if their share of genetic heritage from that world is minimal.

coldtea• 5 months ago

It was both.

ghostoftiber• 5 months ago

The 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 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.

hinkley2• 5 months ago

“Make the tall girl join the women’s basketball/volleyball team.”

philwelch3• 5 months ago

This 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.

kleton2• 5 months ago

It's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.

philwelch3• 5 months ago

By 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.

kleton2• 5 months ago

Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way

So they were indeed Vikings as a matter of heredity?

hinkley2• 5 months ago

99%.

Poor Sven just liked maps but they kept making him come along on their “excursions”.

bitwize• 5 months ago

What'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.

acadapter2• 5 months ago

It 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-Eur...

Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.

theMMaI• 5 months ago

The first part of the word viking, or vik simply means "bay" in nordic languages

BurningFrog2• 5 months ago

The even firster part "vi" means "we" though.

acadapter2• 5 months ago

Yes, but similarity alone is not a guarantee that words are related. The words val and [h]val are not related in Swedish, even though they ended up with the same pronunciation and spelling in the modern language. Sometimes, words can end up as "fossil words" because the main usage of the word was lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word

This can also happen to word roots. Because this is about a historical word, it's interesting to look at the broader Indo-European language tree for clues about the original meaning.

runarberg2• 5 months ago

I don’t speak old norse but I speak Icelandic natively. Víkingur simply means Bay-er, that is somebody from a bay. As an Icelander living in America I experience the English word “viking” as an Exonym for my identity. In Iceland we use “Nordic” or “Scandinavian”, both terms are inclusive of Finns, Sámi, and Greenlanders, so strictly speaking this is not an Enthnonym.

In Icelandic, at least to my knowledge, we have never used Víkingur as an ethnonym (well maybe during a sports game, or among right-wing nationalists). It has always meant raiders. In 2007 there was even a new word dubbed Útrásarvíkingar meaning businessmen who made a bunch of money doing business abroad (buykings would a clever translation of the term).

EDIT: I just remembered that the -ingur suffix can also be used to indicate a temporary state e.g. ruglingur (confusion) and troðningur (trampling [n.]), and was used as such e.g. að fara í víking (to embark to a viking) so víkingur could also mean, a person that embarks to a bay.

bazoom426• 5 months ago

Do we have any historical source of people referring to themselves as vikings?

bdhcuidbebe• 5 months ago

No, because they did not. Title is correct, it was a job not a tribe

bazoom426• 5 months ago

Sounds rather far-fetched. “Viking” only started getting used as an ethonym in the 19th century. In the sagas it it only used in the meaning of raider, pirate or outlaw. The etymology of “vik” (bay) is much more plausible.

jibal• 5 months ago

Never 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.

bazoom426• 5 months ago

The 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.

jeltz2• 5 months ago

Yeah, and the Norse also called non-norse raiders Vikings. It was just a word meaning raider or pirate.

bazoom426• 5 months ago

The 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• 5 months ago

And they didn't use emacs, because they were Vi-Kings

boutell• 5 months ago

Later the vimkings pushed them out. Then they were suppressed by the vs-igoths, but modern day enthusiasts still call themselves neo-vimkings

HerbManic• 5 months ago

I have come out of lurking here. But that pun was so good/awful I just sent it to Richard Stallman for his collection of puns.

enjoykaz• 5 months ago

The 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

bazoom426• 5 months ago

Don’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.

VikingCoder• 5 months ago

Well said.

geodel• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

So 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• 5 months ago

That's a misconception TFA is talking about.

B1FF_PSUVM• 5 months ago

"Farming is hard, let's go viking"

bazoom426• 5 months ago

No, 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• 5 months ago

From old Norse a viking is a pirate or raider often including rape.

‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)

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