Vikings Possibly Carried Native American to Europe

[Pallantides]

http://news.discovery.com/archaeolog...can-woman.html

The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.

The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus traveled to the "New World."

Spain's CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians.

"It was thought at first that (the DNA) came from recently established Asian families in Iceland," CSIC researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox was quoted as saying in a statement by the institute. "But when family genealogy was studied, it was discovered that the four families were descended from ancestors who lived between 1710 and 1740 from the same region of southern Iceland."

The lineage found, named C1e, is also mitochondrial, which means that the genes were introduced into Iceland by a woman.

"As the island was virtually isolated from the 10th century, the most likely hypothesis is that these genes corresponded to an Amerindian woman who was brought from America by the Vikings around the year 1000," said Lalueza-Fox.

The researchers used data from the Rejkjavik-based genomics company deCODE Genetics.

He said the research team hopes to find more instances of the same Native American DNA in Iceland's population, starting in the same region in the south of the country near the massive Vatnajokull glacier.

The report, by scientists from the CSIC and the University of Iceland, was also published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The journal said 75 to 80 percent of contemporary Icelanders can trace their lineage to Scandinavia and the rest to Scotland and Ireland.

But the C1e lineage is "one of a handful that was involved in the settlement of the Americas around 14,000 years ago.

"Contrary to an initial assumption that this lineage was a recent arrival (in Iceland), preliminary genealogical analyses revealed that the C1 lineage was present in the Icelandic mitochondrial DNA pool at least 300 years ago" said the journal. "This raised the intriguing possibility that the Icelandic C1 lineage could be traced to Viking voyages to the Americas that commenced in the 10th century."


Norwegian article about the study:
http://www.forskning.no/artikler/2010/november/270547

[Osweo]

Is there any indication that we're dealing with Inuits here, or Indians from much further south?

I just flicked through my files, and see that while C is very common in America, but that it's also seen at its highest levels in the Tungus of Siberia. The furthest west it's shown on the same map is a dash among the Komi, who may have figured in Norse history among the peoples of Biarmia (some of whom I learn from another thread here were settled in northern Norway at a very early period). It's thus not impossible that a little seepage occured all the way to Norway, no? Or does the specific clade preclude this?

[Curtis24]

well, that explains bjork

[Curtis24]

but seriously, you mean the vikings wanted to have sex with exotic women? who would have thought

EDIT: but seriously, this is pretty interesting.

[Pallantides]

Wonder if any of the Native American genes made their way to southern Norway also...


Future headline:
Adam Beach finds out he have relatives in Lindesnes in Vest-Agder, Norway:

[Arne]

You possibly have Native American Ancestors.
Are you now more proud of yourself ?

[Pallantides]

You possibly have Native American Ancestors.
Are you now more proud of yourself ?

On one of Davide's admixture runs I scored ca. 1% Amerindian, but some of the Swedes got 2% so I don't know if it's an indication of anything...

[lei.talk]

"Haplogroup C is believed to have arisen somewhere between the Caspian Sea and Lake Baikal some 60,000 years before present. Haplogroup C is found in Northeast Asia (including Siberia). Haplogroup C is one of five mtDNA haplogroups found in the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the others being A, B, D, and X. The subclades C1b, C1c, C1d, and C4c are found in the first people of the Americas. C1a is found only in Asia."

Originally Posted by Iberia
You are here showing your ignorance,
since haplogroups have nothing to do with admixture.

...a person with minimal knowledge on genetics knows that haplogroups is a completely different concept than admixture:
Only Autosomal DNA can determine ancestry...

...you have no fuckin idea about genetics.
Haplogroups have nothing to do with admixture.

would some one be help-full
and clarify this miss-understanding?

is this a language-problem
or did i sleep through some crucial classes?

*

[Agrippa]

Well, we can't be sure yet, as almost always in such matters of the interpretation of genetic results:

Our results indicate a latest possible arrival date in Iceland of just prior to 1700 and a likely arrival date centuries earlier. Most surprisingly, we demonstrate that the Icelandic C1 lineage does not belong to any of the four known Native American (C1b, C1c, and C1d) or Asian (C1a) subclades of haplogroup C1. Rather, it is presently the only known member of a new subclade, C1e. While a Native American origin seems most likely for C1e, an Asian or European origin cannot be ruled out.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/11...celanders.html

So probably we deal with some sort of archaic hunter-gatherer groups as well - even if that is less likely, it might be still possible.

Also, the Inuits/Eskimids and some Indianid groups replaced and eliminated some earlier strata, especially for the Eskimos that is a clear thing, they erradicated an older group adapted to the habitat they now inhabitat.

So another option would be, since that doesn't date so long back, that the Vikings brought a more "Palae-Indian", "Palae-Eskimo" woman with them, which original population is now shrunken to almost nothing or even eliminated, so that it couldn't be proven in Eskimos so far.

I'm especially thinking about people like the Sadlermiut:

They are sometimes thought to have been the last remnants of the Dorset culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadlermiut

The Paleo-Eskimo were the peoples who inhabited the Arctic region from Chukotka (e.g. Chertov Ovrag) in present-day Russia[1] across North America to Greenland prior to the rise of the modern Inuit and/or Eskimo and related cultures. The first known Paleo-Eskimo cultures developed by 2500 BCE, but were gradually displaced in most of the region, with the last one, the Dorset culture, disappearing around 1500 CE.

Paleo-Eskimo groups included the Pre-Dorset; the Saqqaq culture of Greenland (2500 - 800 BCE); the Independence I and Independence II cultures of northeastern Canada and Greenland (c. 2400 – 1800 BCE and c. 800 – 1 BCE); the Groswater of Labrador and Nunavik, and the Dorset culture (500 BCE to 1500 CE), which spread across Arctic North America. The Dorset were the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture in the Arctic before the migration east from present-day Alaska of the Thule, the ancestors of the modern Inuit.

In February 2010, scientists reported they had performed the first genome sequencing of an ancient human. Using fragments of hair 4,000 years old, the National Museum of Denmark, Beijing Genomics Institute, and additional collaborating scientific institutions sequenced nearly 80% of a Paleo-Eskimo man's genome. The man was found in Greenland and believed to be from the prehistoric Saqqaq culture.

Based on the genome, the scientists believe there was a distinct, separate migration of peoples from Siberia to North America some 5,500 years ago. They noted that this was independent of earlier migrations whose descendants comprised the historic cultures of Native Americans and Inuit. By 4,500 years ago, descendants of that later migration had reached Greenland. The remains used for analysis were found in a Saqqaq culture area.[3]

The scientists reported that the man, dubbed "Inuk", had A+ blood type, genes suggesting he was adapted to cold weather, had brown eyes, brownish skin, dark hair, and would likely bald later in life. This marked the first sequencing of an ancient human's genome and the first sequencing of an ancient human's mitochondrial genome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Eskimo

It is always "funny", or better naive, stupid and/or hypocritical, if people talk about other people than Europeans in a way as if they never would have moved, led wars, genocides and replaced other people.

The more powerful and progressive people - culturally and/or racially - always took the land they wanted or just needed, that's one of the major reasons for war and women were often part of the booty, but not always. Sometimes they were killed too.

Would be really interesting to know the EXACT path of this mtDNA in Northern Europe.

In that case, so is my conclusion, this might be another option for the origin of this mtDNA-variant.

[Pallantides]

but seriously, you mean the vikings wanted to have sex with exotic women? who would have thought

EDIT: but seriously, this is pretty interesting.

I guess some Vikings were notorius miscegenators