‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows

“Viking-style graves excavated on the United Kingdom’s Orkney islands contained individuals with no Scandinavian DNA, whereas some people buried in Scandinavia had Irish and Scottish parents. And several individuals in Norway were buried as Vikings, but their genes identified them as Saami, an Indigenous group genetically closer to East Asians and Siberians than to Europeans. ‘These identities aren’t genetic or ethnic, they’re social,’ Jarman says. ‘To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.’”
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