 What is the genetic legacy of the Vikings and could you have a percentage of Viking DNA in your ancestry? I know I probably do, given that I'm Scottish, but the genetic legacy of the Vikings extends far and wide across Europe. But firstly, what does Viking actually mean? Today we often refer to the Vikings like they were some cohesive, unified group. But is this true? Although later in the Viking Age, we saw more organised political structures like the North Sea Empire, they unified the crowns of England, Norway and Denmark in the 11th century AD. The Vikings is somewhat of a loose term and implies as much the action of raiding by sea rather than a fully unified group, yet there are some major traits that give us a framework to work from. Cambridge Dictionary defines a Viking as a person belonging to a race of Scandinavian people who travel by sea and attack parts of northern and southern Europe between the 8th and 11th centuries, often stained to live in the places they travelled to. The Vikings were mainly men, originally from the Scandinavian countries that we call Norway, Sweden and Denmark today. Particularly in the early phases of the Viking Age, there seemed to be a large separation between the three areas, with only limited contact between them. As well as exploring large parts of Europe, reaching as far afield as parts of modern Russia and Turkey, they also reached the Americas. They built the settlement of Lancer Meadows in Newfoundland, an eastern island off the coast of Canada. The Vikings clearly loved exploring and the gradually expanded their foothold in the North Atlantic, creating new Viking bases of operation. Left Ericsson for instance, a North explorer who was thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus, was born in Iceland and died in Greenland. His father, Eric the Red, is considered the first European to settle Greenland. Now that we have a good overview of the Vikings, what about their genetic legacy? Well obviously they have a strong genetic footprint in modern-day Scandinavian populations, but the genetic legacy extends across Europe. A fascinating study that was published in Nature in 2020 looked at the population genomics of the Viking world. They sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites dating from the Bronze Age, about 2400 BC to the early modern period, about 1600 AD. Across Europe and Greenland, to understand the maritime expansion of Scandinavian populations during the Viking Age, which the study dates from around 750 to around 1050 AD. The data from these individuals was then analysed together with published data from 3855 present-day individuals and around 1118 ancient individuals. A really interesting finding from this study was that Vikings from the three different Scandinavian countries had a genetic impact on different countries, i.e. the study found that there was a major influx of Danish Viking ancestry in England, an influx of Swedish Viking ancestry into the Baltic area, and an influx of Norwegian Viking ancestry into Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. Just looking at the map, geography may be the main reason for this. Norway is obviously closer to Iceland, Greenland and Ireland than the others. Denmark is relatively close to England, and Sweden is closest to the Baltic countries. It seems Vikings tended to explore the lands closest to them, at least initially anyway. This pattern also shows the separation between the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish Vikings. All three didn't just all join together and go raiding. It seems that the lords stuck with their own clique, including with direct family members, and went raiding from there. As opposed to all coming together as a Viking collector from all these three different countries, and then going Viking, going raiding, they seemed to all be in separate units, and then went raiding from there. One point to note is that although the genetic legacy is present in many parts of Europe still today, it is often relatively limited. In England for instance, the Viking's genetic contribution does not exceed 6%. There is a problem, however, when trying to analyse the impact of Danish Vikings on England, it's extremely difficult to separate the presence of Anglo-Saxon DNA and Danish Viking DNA, because many Anglo-Saxons did come from Denmark itself. So separating the influence of Anglo-Saxons from Denmark and Vikings from Denmark is extremely difficult. And the study in nature does point to this aspect also, and is quite well understood, the difficulty in understanding the presence of Danish Vikings versus Danish Anglo-Saxons. One way to get around this problem is to use Norwegian DNA as a proxy for the Vikings, as opposed to Danish DNA. But obviously you don't really get the nuances of separating the Danish from the Norwegian Vikings, and as we have already seen, certainly in the early period of the Viking Age, there was distinctions between the different areas, the different geographical areas, and they didn't all unify into one. One study that used this ploy to get around the problem of Anglo-Saxon versus Viking DNA was the people of the British Isles study, that basically just used Norway as a proxy for the Vikings. But what did they find? Well this study found that there was no obvious genetic signature from the Danelaw period, when a part of England was under the control of Viking Danes. This is not to say that there was no genetic legacy from the Vikings on England during the Danelaw period, it simply says that there was no major genetic influence from Norwegian Vikings on England. But we have already discussed that Norwegian Vikings had much more of an influence on Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. Deciphering how great the impact of Danish Vikings was on England is once again very tricky. The people of the British Isles study did find a significant genetic legacy of the Anglo-Saxons on England, with the Anglo-Saxons accounting for between 10 and 40% of total ancestry of many people in Central, Southern and Eastern England. It may be the case that some of this ancestry attributed to the Anglo-Saxons in this study may actually come from Danish Vikings, but separating that data is extremely challenging. What the people of the British Isles study did find, however, was that in the northern Scottish Isles of Orkney and Shetland, there was a remarkable genetic legacy of the Vikings. The population of Orkney is the most genetically distinct across Britain, and has around 25% of DNA coming from Norwegian ancestors. More broadly, there was a notable Norwegian signal in all of the Scottish samples in this particular study, a clear sign of the Vikings. Shetland also had a strong Viking influence as well, with Norwegian ancestry around 20-25%. Norwegian markers are higher and people with ancestry is from the north of both Orkney and Shetland, which is quite interesting. The more northern you are, the more Norwegian ancestry you have in Orkney and Shetland. Other countries that you wouldn't necessarily think had Viking ancestry also do have a genetic signal. In Poland, for instance, there is a small Scandinavian component in their ancestry in many of the samples from Poland, of up to around 5%. Now, the Vikings obviously had quite considerable genetic impact on many different parts of Europe. By the direction of the Viking age, this increased movement of trade and goods and people, given the seafaring nature of the Vikings, didn't just go in one direction. As well as the Vikings having an impact on different parts of Europe, other parts of Europe had an impact on the Vikings, the homeland of the Vikings in Scandinavia. The nature study from 2020 found substantial ancestry from elsewhere in Europe entering Scandinavia during the Viking age. I'm going to do more into this in a future video on the genetic makeup of the Vikings. But what are your thoughts? Is there any other major areas or good research that's been done on the genetic legacy of the Vikings that I haven't covered in this video around perhaps areas of history you find interesting? The Kievan Rus, for instance, was an area I'd done a wee bit research into, but I couldn't really find too much information. But any good sources on the genetic legacy of the Vikings, please let me know in the comments below, and I can potentially do a follow-up video on that. In general, one of the main takeaways from this video has been that the Vikings were really split into three different areas, for the last part of the Viking Age at least, into the lands we call Norway, Sweden and Denmark today. And the genetic legacy of the Vikings from these three different areas had a different impact on different countries. It wasn't like there was a unified Vikings that had a genetic impact on X, Y or Z. The Norwegian Vikings had more of an impact on Iceland, on Ireland and Greenland. The Danish Vikings, although there is the problem between Anglosaxon or Viking, but let's just say the Danish Vikings seem to have more of an impact on England. And then obviously the Swedish Vikings had more of an impact on the Baltic states that seems to be geographically correlated. But speaking about genetic legacies, what was the genetic legacy of another major episode in history, the Roman Empire? To find out, please click here. Thanks for watching, please subscribe and hit the bell to tell your friends and family about this channel. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below as well. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time.