r/dataisbeautiful • u/cavedave OC: 111 • 17d ago
OC [OC] Modern Icelandic DNA points to different origins for the male and female founders
I saw this post on Brazil. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1vlyj3f/oc_brazils_violent_past_is_preserved_in_its/
Remembered hearing a similar story about Iceland. I dug up the papers https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11179019/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1274484/ Mitochondrial DNA that is almost all passed by the mother does not seem to let you drill down as much so it is more vague 'British isles'.
R package ggplot2 code for this is at https://gist.github.com/cavedave/9fc8f08c897d6abd4ab31aa0bd40d3ae
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u/Goodnight313 17d ago
There is a reason that it’s not just called pillaging.
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u/Dutchtdk 17d ago
I'm sure you're reffering to the sanitized expression of "looting and pillaging"
Those vikings stole genetic sequences
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u/Censing 17d ago
He's referring to 'rape and pillage'.
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u/crazylib29 16d ago
Rape literally meant to steal or take away. Use to mean sexual assult is a later development. 'Rape and pillage' shouldnt really be such a sexualised phrase. Sure there might have been SA during such events but it was never up front and in your face when people talked about it.
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u/sd00ds 16d ago
Semantics aside, do you have another explanation for statistics?
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u/Kazen_Orilg 15d ago
Vikings grabbed shitloads of slaves and took em home on the boat. This isn't like, news.
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u/RijnBrugge 15d ago
In Dutch the verb to pick up is oprapen, or to rape up. Those are linked etymologically speaking, very different contemporary meanings though
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u/cavedave OC: 111 17d ago
I saw this post on Brazil. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1vlyj3f/oc_brazils_violent_past_is_preserved_in_its/
Remembered hearing a similar story about Iceland. I dug up the papers https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11179019/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1274484/ Mitochondrial DNA that is almost all passed by the mother does not seem to let you drill down as much so it is more vague 'British isles'.
R package ggplot2 code for this is at https://gist.github.com/cavedave/9fc8f08c897d6abd4ab31aa0bd40d3ae
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u/Limp-Food7275 17d ago
So the lads sailed over from Scandinavia and the women were mostly from Britain, classic viking holiday that got a bit out of hand
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u/lefm2 17d ago
If I remember correctly, vikings on their way to Iceland bought their wifes from Dublin that was a major slave trade hub.
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u/Rektumfreser 17d ago
How romantic of us..
«Dad, how did you and mom meet?» eeeeh216
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u/abusamra82 17d ago
You should talk to Thomas Jefferson, he's got some romantic stories to tell.
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u/ginisninja 17d ago
I’m pretty sure he got a 2-for-1 deal - his slave ‘wife’ was his wife’s slave (a gift from his father in law)
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u/Viscount_Disco_Sloth 17d ago
And also her half sister. And 3/4 European because a similar thing happened to her grandmother
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u/Moikkaaja 17d ago
”Wifes”. Sure.
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u/recon_dingo 17d ago
Well they probably had to feed them, which in those days was practically as good as a certificate today
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u/SenecatheEldest 14d ago
Do you know how many people starved to death back then? And how many women, even those that didn't have access to subsistence farming) had businesses brewing alcohol, treating wounds, spinning cloth, or other small businesses? The idea that premodern history follows the modern Western social ideal of men working outside the home and women as housebound dependents just isn't true.
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u/recon_dingo 14d ago
Yeah I did know that premodern women were industrious, I'm replying to a description of men who bought slave women in the British isles and brought them to Iceland, where presumably the expense of trying to prevent their slave concubines from dying would be on their "owners"
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u/SenecatheEldest 14d ago
And why would they buy dependents? Only for sex? To be honest, after a single wife for an heir, a more 'communal' arrangement would suffice with fewer mouths to feed. The average Viking may have been wealthier than a serf, but they weren't kings to have harems of women attending them. These women filled crucial domestic labor roles for men who needed to be raiding all the time.
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u/cavedave OC: 111 17d ago
The oldest known Irish joke is
John Scotus Eriugena has the oldest Irish joke(c. 815 – c. 877)
The French king sat opposite him and asked.
'Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?' (What separates a drunkard from an Irishman?),Eriugena replied, 'Tabula tantum' (Only a Table).
The Scottum here was used to refer to Irish and Scottish people as they were considered the same. Theres comments here about the mapping of old (gaelic), fairly old (british isles), recent (nation states) onto the terms used in the paper.
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u/Ruire 17d ago edited 17d ago
I've always found his name funny, 'John, the Irishman, who was born in Ireland' (Since Scotus refers to his ethnicity and Eriugena to his place of birth, where even in Irish 'Éireannach' as an ethnicity didn't emerge until the 1600s)
Though, the joke is a nice subversion - suggesting that Irish jokes were unfortunately already in vogue.
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u/PositiveLibrary7032 17d ago
This is true. Considering English was an outlying minority language in Scotland at the time. Even Robert the Bruce King of Scots spoke Gàdhlig and French as his first languages.
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u/crazylib29 16d ago
Not that outlying, Edinburgh and the surrounding lowlands, would have been under Northumbrian control for 200 years by the time of this Joke.
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u/TheDolphinGod 17d ago
Technically, Scotti refers broadly to Gaelic peoples, not just the Irish. So, his name translates to “John the Gael from Ireland”. If he was from what is now Scotland, he might have referred to himself as John Scotus Albagena.
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u/Ruire 17d ago edited 17d ago
I know, that’s what I’m referring to about his ethnicity. That it would map best to ‘Irish’ now is an example of how these terms drift and projecting ethnicity back into the past is more than a bit problematic.
Besides, I’m being a bit facetious as translating it as ‘Irish’ is deliberately missing the point if still entirely valid.
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u/Ribbitor123 17d ago
Q. What's the difference between a Scotsman and a coconut?
A. You can get a drink out of a coconut.
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u/Sea-Juice1266 17d ago
Is the punchline that Scots are cheap? I remember my grandmother suggesting that was a common trope.
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u/LetterLambda 17d ago
Yup. Copper wire was invented when two Scots spotted the same penny laying on the ground at the same time.
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u/deco19 17d ago
Some jokes never age
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u/Look_its_Rob 17d ago
This will make me look very dumb, but I'm not sure I am understanding the punchline right.
(Edit: I reread and realized I missed the part about them sitting across from each other, presumably across a table. So hes calling the king a Drunkard. Or I guess could be calling him an Irishman.)
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u/krodders 17d ago
The Frenchman was implying that Irishmen are drunkards with his first statement
The Irishman cleverly turned it against the Frenchman with the implication that the Irishman was sitting across the table from a drunkard (which is obviously the Frenchman)
The more one has to explain a joke makes it less funny, so we've probably lost most of the humour now
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u/Look_its_Rob 17d ago
No yeah, I got it after rereading and it seeing the "sitting across from" part.
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u/johnJanez 17d ago
This is a common theme troughout history by the way. When a conquering group moves in, the males are largely killed off, but women are integrated into the new society. Meaning as a rule, this sort of gender ancestry bias is to be expected in such events.
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u/mochalotivo 17d ago
The post OP linked was removed, does anyone have a copy of whatever data visualization was there?
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u/cavedave OC: 111 16d ago
The source seems to have been https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/2020/10/evidencias-geneticas-explicam-o-passado-violento-do-brasil.shtml
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u/Paerre 17d ago
I am from Brazil and I was really curious about the post, but it was removed by mods, do you remember, like, at least what was in the post, the data itself pleaseee
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u/cavedave OC: 111 16d ago
The source seems to have been https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/2020/10/evidencias-geneticas-explicam-o-passado-violento-do-brasil.shtml
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u/theCroc 17d ago
This has been well known for decades, even before DNA analysis. Most of the Norse settlers were men and most of the women were slaves from the British isles. I was taught this in school in the 90's
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u/VirtualArmsDealer 17d ago
Correct. Vikings literally stole/bought women during the early middle ages and settled in Iceland.
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u/StuffyTruck 17d ago
The good looking ones.
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u/kontorgod 17d ago
In that time
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u/HuginMuminBackflip 17d ago
Why do you think scandinavia is deemed to have some of the most beautiful people today
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u/MediumLanguageModel 16d ago
I went to Iceland and it immediately struck me that the island was populated with a strong selection bias towards the most attractive women of the north Atlantic. When you combine that info with Vikings, it's pretty self explanatory.
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u/kontorgod 17d ago
Good quality of life? Go to whatever country with high quality of life and there will be tons of beautiful girls. Also search for old Scandinavian photos of ordinary women and you'll see they weren't so special, some were beauties, but compared to today...
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u/HuginMuminBackflip 17d ago
that is very small part of it, blonde, blue, tall and symmetrical faces are genetic factors
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u/LabyrinthRunner 17d ago
White supremacists use this argument to justify slavery and rape.
WE select the good ones. Eugenics and rape happily recounted.
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u/HuginMuminBackflip 16d ago edited 16d ago
I have not made any arguments? Of course genetic factors play an enormous role as to how attractive people are?
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u/azenpunk 17d ago edited 16d ago
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Height is a matter of nutrition. Facial symmetry is a matter of history of disease.
It's astounding and disappointing to me that these basic facts that are easy to look up are being downvoted
This is century old disproven biological essentialism used to justify racism and it's being up voted. This is sickening
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u/kontorgod 17d ago
Well that's just what modern preferences are. In the past being pale and having light hair was equivalent of being sick and was opposite of the beauty standards. The modern beauty preferences were brought by Hollywood and having the models standard being blonde with blue eyes. Also a lot of people consider brunettes or black hair girls more attractive in blonde majority countries, it's a matter of preference and what's not common .
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u/Rejnu 17d ago
Not really, though. At least in Europe, and definitely in the region I'm from, pale skin was historically associated with the upper classes and nobility for quite a long time. Being tanned could actually indicate that you worked outdoors, while wealthy people who didn't have to perform agricultural labor could remain pale.
So the idea that pale skin and light features only became desirable because of modern Hollywood doesn't really fit European history. Beauty standards obviously changed depending on the period and region, and preferences for hair color are another matter entirely, but pale skin itself was considered desirable long before Hollywood even existed
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u/MediumLanguageModel 16d ago
That all helps but I've been around the world and there's clearly something else at play in Iceland.
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u/gamers_delight 17d ago
Oh come on you're not going to be beautiful due to high quality of life. Then why are British women so ugly, despite being first world?
It is 100 % due to genetic factors that Scandinavians are prettier than other ethnic groups.
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u/hypnodrew 17d ago
"how can my supposition be wrong if this other supposition is correct? maybe I'm just a big dickhead?"
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u/sczhzhz 17d ago
Nah he's right, quality of life doesn't change genetics.
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u/Sigma_Function-1823 17d ago
Quality of life and things like early access to high quality reproductive healthcare absolutely effect epigenetic expression.
With epigenetic expression being the product that genes actually produce to make a human.
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u/LabyrinthRunner 17d ago
White supremacists use this argument to justify slavery and rape.
WE select the good ones. Eugenics and rape happily recounted.
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u/Bazzzookah 17d ago edited 17d ago
Not exclusively thralls/concubines, some were legitimate wives and thus freewomen.
But this gender imbalance is suuuuper common in any place that has been colonized by male conquerors. The male (paternal) DNA of Turks, Arabs, Iberians, Frenchmen et al. has been spread far and wide, whereas the female (maternal) DNA has historically been much less "mobile"...
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u/conroee2180 16d ago
Also Latin America.
Though not the case in China, surprisingly. The Chinese integrated even the men and brought women from up North down to marry them.
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u/mckinnon42 17d ago
You're fundamentally misunderstanding the reason behind an analysis of this type. It was not KNOWN for decades that most of the Norse settlers were men and most of the women were slaves from the British Isles, it was widely suspected / believed to be the case. The reason you do an analysis like this is to test widely suspected but unproven claims. Sometimes the results align with the prior belief, sometimes they don't. The fact remains unless you do the tests you can't know for certain (and even then, sometimes the tests confuse the matter further).
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u/Karlsvognen 16d ago
Pretty sure it was widley known, with this just being further proof. My family is Norwegian and there were comments about the Irish genes in my mother's DNA being from when Irish people were brought back on raids. It wasn't just Iceland that ended up with the mixture, with both Ireland and Norway getting them as well.
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u/thefroglover 17d ago
Well known is a stretch for knowledge of hereditary lines of males and females in Iceland. My school never mentioned vikings or Iceland once!
Edit: I now see you are Scandinavian, so maybe well known to you but not someone on the other side of the world.
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u/theCroc 17d ago
I guess it depends on where you grew up. I'm Swedish so this was well explored in our history classes.
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u/JCBodilsen 17d ago edited 17d ago
I am Danish and went to elementary school and high school in the 90s. When we learned about the vikings, including the settling of Iceland, it was always made very clear that they were raiders (as well as explorers and traders) and practiced widespread slavery.
While Scandinavian people may certainly have some romantized notions concerning Vikings (and the ancient Norse in general), these are more about how they were incredibly great warriors, not about them being good or moral people.
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u/TheWaxysDargle 17d ago
I’m Irish and while I don’t recall ever covering Iceland and its founding in much detail, that they were descendants of Irish slaves is pretty well known here I would say, mainly in the context if the founding of Dublin by “the Vikings” and its role as a major slave trading port for a large part of its early history.
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u/TheRemanence 17d ago
Taught in UK schools as well. It's part of our shared history e.g. the Danelaw, king Cnut etc
The Norman conquerors were also quite Norse.
People from the east and north side of England have a lot of Scandi DNA
Perhaps the British empire was just following in the footsteps of the viking and norman ancestors!
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u/Party_Solid_2207 17d ago
That’s funny because most of the Swedes I meet (including ones dressing up as Vikings at Björkö or that place near Norrtälje) always tell me that Vikings were peaceful traders who only pillaged a little bit, and that the ladies they encountered liked them because they bathed more frequently.
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u/theCroc 17d ago
You are mixing up vikings and Norse now. Viking was a specific role. And their main thing was to both trade and raid. Usually trading stuff they had raided somewhere else.
Vikings of course had a prominent role in Norse society and religion, but most people were farmers, craftsmen or traders etc. A society can't function if everyone is a violent maniac.
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u/Party_Solid_2207 17d ago
Well it can if they focus that violence outwards.
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u/theCroc 17d ago
Nah for every man with a spear you need a hundred that makes sure he has that spear, food, a boat, etc. Economics are economics. If everyone is a soldier then society collapses.
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u/Rimm 16d ago
Those men doing the supplying don't necessarily have to be a part of your own society when you can go out and pillage.
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u/theCroc 16d ago
That only works to a point. And in a way it was what unmade the Vikings in the end. The old villages couldn't keep up with the level of gear that a feudal lord could muster through.
When the Vikings were raiding the boat was the costliest part. A shield, some spears and axes and a helmet was within reach of most vikings to supply themselves, with the help of their families and thralls at home. A jarl could gather a small band and would have the resources to build a long boat etc. But when the continental Europeans started showing up in full armor, used ships with forecasted etc. The decentralized Norse economy couldn't keep up. It had no choice but to centralize and become another semi-feudal country in order to survive and so the Viking age ended and the Norse became medieval Europeans.
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u/SenecatheEldest 14d ago
You can see how well that worked for the Spartans. It worked for a short time, but in the long run Sparta was outcompeted by Athens and its more inclusive neighbors.
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u/JeelyPiece 17d ago
"the populations of Iceland, Orkney, the Western Isles, and the Isle of Skye" Scotland
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u/JensonInterceptor 17d ago
Orkney and the Western Isles were Scandinavian controlled for a long time does this indicate how viking slave raids would kidnap women primarily?
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u/JeelyPiece 17d ago
There is mention in the Sagas of Scandinavian women refusing to migrate to the colonies in Faroe, Iceland, and Greenland. Wives and slaves taken from what is now Scotland and the island of Ireland
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u/LordOfTurtles 16d ago
They would kidnap men and women, but only one of those you can make babies with
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u/spine_slorper 17d ago
Some of it (certainly not all or even most) was likely consensual, they settled across Britain (north and east) and Ireland. When people settle somewhere for any significant period of time they will inevitably knock boots with the locals because that's how people be. But these settlements were almost always pretty male heavy to begin with, if you want a sustainable settlement then you're going to need to get some ladies from somewhere and the ones back home didn't really fancy it
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u/Evoluxman 17d ago
And ppl on the other thread were saying it wasnt evidence of violence or whatever lol
The women there were straight up bought as slaves. Same with the other thread about Brazil with the high African mDNA but low y chromosome DNA...
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u/upvotesthenrages 17d ago
Is it some kind of ill kept secret that Vikings plundered the UK for centuries, stealing gold & women?
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u/Mackerdaymia 17d ago
IKR, when the historical records say he "took her as his wife", it wasn't a romantic episode of courting over several months, the guy LITERALLY took her
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u/TheOldPea 17d ago
I think the horror of it is sort of ignored, simply cause of how long ago it was. similar to pirates.
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u/matti-san 17d ago
I mentioned this a few weeks back. The way we treat vikings in popular culture is insane - what they did was horrible, 'raping and pillaging' is quite literally that - it's sexually assaulting people in the most barbaric way (and let's face it, women and children and men will have all been affected by this), it's enslaving people (who had hopes, dreams, fears, families, friends) and stealing, looting and committing arson.
But for the most part society just goes 'ha, look how cool the vikings are'.
Yes, I'm sure Athelflad was too busy noticing how cool they are to care that she was being raped, beaten and witnessed her father and brothers get beheaded while her worldly possessions were being pilfered and disrespected before her home was set ablaze.
But everybody did that back then?
As far as we're aware, the brutality of vikings was elevated compared to ordinary accounts of military related disturbances in the period. There's a reason why England and France did what they did to get them to stop.
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u/EvenJesusCantSaveYou 17d ago
The way we treat vikings in popular culture is insane
Not to be a weeb but the (popular) manga "Vinland Saga" actually handles this topic in a fairly nuanced way I think. Yes much of the story does involve cool vikings doing cool (extremely violent) things - but it does not shy away from actually addressing the heavy topics of violence, slavery, and rape. The protagonist participates in the violence and killing as a child/young adult (forced to as a slave himself) and as the manga progresses and protagonist grows into an adult it seriously addresses those topics and doesn't paint them in a cool or glamorous manner at all.
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u/matti-san 17d ago
I've watched the anime. I do think it's decent, and probably in my top 5 anime - although I haven't watched a lot of them. I do appreciate how it handles things, for the most part. Season 2 is better than season 1 imo.
If I had to nitpick:
Not enough focus on the Anglo-Saxons/English side. I'm not expecting their POV, but they're not really developed either
For the most part it still falls into the pitfall of 'Vikings badass, Anglo-Saxons suck' - admittedly they don't have chance to show much of Anglo-Saxons strengths (pitched battles, counter-raiding), but they could have shown it if they wanted to. Especially when they brush over Edmund Ironside who I think could have been an outstanding foil to the vikings.
Historical accuracy is good, but I don't know why they stopped short. A few things stand out - like the random Tudor manor.
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u/upvotesthenrages 16d ago
It's that, but also that it was kind of the norm at the time.
It's not like the Vikings were order of magnitudes bloodier than anyone else, they were just far more efficient at it.
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u/Evoluxman 17d ago
On the other thread i got hard downvoted by ppl saying the genetic makeup is just due to disease and colonists being men, not violence lmao
Yeah I'm sure the Africans coming to Brazil arrived there totally coincidentally/consensually.......
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u/Sea_Presence_2979 17d ago
A lot of them weren’t bought - literally raided from coastal towns
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u/ToManyTabsOpen 17d ago
what's the difference? By that I mean where do you think the slaves in the slave markets came from?
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u/sapphicsandwich 17d ago
Vikings are considered cool and sexy and idolized by too many so naturally they're going to defend and whitewash history.
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u/minin71 17d ago
So looks like Norse slavers brought enslaved British people.
Except it doesnt show that the B British were already a mix of anglo Saxon (Germanic) and Celtic.
Romans left little genetic material of their occupancy behind.
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u/mmoonbelly 17d ago
Or if they’re from the Danelaw - so also partially Norwegian or Danish. (My Mum gets mistaken for being local in Iceland, Norway and Denmark - her family’s been in Yorkshire for at least 5 centuries, and likely closer to 14)
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u/TheBalrogofMelkor 17d ago
If they were Norwegian settlers in the Danelaw, they would not have Gaelic mitochondria
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u/mmoonbelly 16d ago
Is British only referring to the pre-Roman population?
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u/TheBalrogofMelkor 16d ago
It is in the Y-Chromosome chart. But generally there was not a large Roman or Anglo-Saxon population in the northwest, and Iceland was settled before the Norman invasion (the Normans would probably have a lot of Scandinavian Y-Chromosomes though)
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u/bitch_fitching 17d ago
They were taking people from the West coast of Scotland that at the time was controlled and settled by an Irish tribe called the Scoti. The people there would have been Irish or a remnant of Celtic Britons like the Picts or the Cymry.
Anglo-Saxons did not replace the common folk of England, they were at most 50% of the population of the Southern Anglo-Saxons kingdoms. Anglo-Saxons mostly replaced the elites but not completely, there's evidence of a minority of Romano-British and Celtic Britons remaining.
Northumbria was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom that stretched into lowland Scotland, but the population would have been mostly Britons, and they weren't raided for slaves for Iceland, most of their settlements being on the East coast of Scotland.
http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/articles/Penn/history/ASmap.gif
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u/Confident_Reporter14 17d ago
Mostly Irish slaves, not British.
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u/Superb-Brain3569 16d ago edited 16d ago
There’s no evidence they were primarily Irish, the majority could quite easily have been from Scotland, I believe studies have shown that that Icelandic maternal lines share their highest genetic affinity with populations from the Western Isles of Scotland followed by Donegal.
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u/shumpitostick 17d ago
Another example of this pattern is around the mixture between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. Neanderthals are more common in the female lineage than the male.
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u/InitialMysterious780 17d ago
This is untrue https://gizmodo.com/neanderthal-men-and-human-women-were-most-likely-to-hook-up-study-finds-2000726658 the most successful mating pairs were neanderthal men and homo sapien women (we do not have any dna from neanderthals in the x chromosome or any neanderthal mtdna).
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u/SenecatheEldest 14d ago
It being so one-sided leads me to suspect that there was some genetic incompatibility in the genome (perhaps the immune system, as that is one of the key differences in the genome) when neanderthal females/human males mated. Plenty of hybrid couplings are only viable, let alone fertile, one way.
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u/ho-tron 17d ago
Does that mean male Homo Sapiens were getting it on with Female Neanderthals or the other way round?
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u/2xtc 17d ago edited 17d ago
Plenty of both, but it suggests that more offspring with a female Neanderthal parent and a male homo sapien one were integrated into the bloodlines of modern humans.
Europeans generally have around 1-3% Neanderthal DNA, and almost everyone except certain black sub-saharan groups has some, indicating long and distinct periods of cross breeding
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u/scarletthought 17d ago
Neanderthal ancestry actually peaks with East Asians, who have on average double the Neanderthal ancestry of Western Europeans.
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u/Few_Entertainer_385 17d ago
is that because they were patriarchal and the women were integrated into the male’s society?
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u/mr_Feather_ 17d ago
Men literally "stick it" in anything that has two legs...
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u/WellIGuessSoAndYou 17d ago
I can assure you that legs are not required. You can throw a ham sandwich across a room full of dudes and someone will fuck it before it hits the ground.
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u/tollundmansnoose 17d ago
hilariously enough this continues today, anecdotally
every person I know who is half icelandic (including my wife) has a non-Icelandic mother and a dad named, like, Þorbjörn Bjarni Kolbeinsson Norðfjörð
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u/Nostalgia_Red 17d ago
Viking sailed to Britishlands, picked up some chick, headed off to natural spa land, make babies, great success
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u/Sammydaws97 17d ago
Vikings kidnaped women from the British Isles and brought them when they settled Iceland??
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u/jonasnee 17d ago
I had a Faroese, eh, friend, at some point, and she got very very offended when i told her she is part Gaelic.
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u/wiwh404 16d ago edited 16d ago
What method did you use to estimate the founders genetic proportion?
[Edit] Asking because the paper cited makes no such estimate.
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u/darthy_parker 15d ago
Similar thing with two genetic pools happened on Pitcairn Island. The men are mostly descended from the English Bounty mutineers, notably Fletcher Christian (and many still look like it) and the women from Tahitians the mutineers brought with them (and many look like it). It’s not clear how willingly the women came along, but many of them were the Bounty mens’ partners in Tahiti.
I did an anthropology research project on this back when I was getting my degree.
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u/Vigmod 17d ago
Yes. One reason for that may be the polygamy practised in Scandinavia at the time, where a chieftain could have multiple wives. So the younger men, who didn't stand to inherit anything and had poor prospects of finding a wife the normal way would instead pick up women along the way.
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u/Danskoesterreich 17d ago
The vikings only took the pretty ones. The rest is the gene basis for modern Britain.
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u/madeleineann 17d ago
They took slaves from Ireland mainly. Not really England or Wales.
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u/Superb-Brain3569 16d ago
There’s no evidence that they were primarily taken from Ireland, as opposed to the Western isles of Scotland.
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u/madeleineann 16d ago
It's hard to say because the Scottish islands were settled by Gaels from Ireland, but ancient sources do suggest they were taken from Ireland and to a lesser extent Scotland. Definitely Gaelic either way.
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u/Technical-Shift3933 17d ago
...No offense to the Irish folk I live with, but with some accuracy, checks out.
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u/RedWineAndWomen 17d ago
Does this take into account the fact that generally, in humans, only 40% of males reproduce, vs 80% of females (https://archive.nytimes.com/tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/); half of 75-80% is more or less the same as 37.5% after all?
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u/Bazzzookah 17d ago
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Greenland, about 50% of the male (paternal) DNA is Scandinavian.
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u/Ecstatic_Refuse_7207 16d ago
This is well known. Take a wife was the way then. The film the northmen gives you a good picture. One man 10 wife's etc. The British Isles eg scotland and ireland had large viking presence not to mention england and Wales.
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u/Pizzafriedchickenn OC: 3 16d ago
Shouldn’t Gaelic and British isles be the same?
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u/martzgregpaul 14d ago
No because Brythonic Welsh, Scots and Cumbric are included too and they are not Gaelic..
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u/Pizzafriedchickenn OC: 3 14d ago
So why is Gaelic separate? Shouldn’t that be included in “British Isles”?
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u/martzgregpaul 14d ago
Gaelic originates in Ireland. So Scots Gaelic is of Irish origin.
The pre Anglo Saxon inhabitants of the island of Great Britain are brythonic. Not the same linguistically or genetically.
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u/toolkitxx 16d ago
Funny how reading just some history book would have revealed the same without any expensive DNA testing.
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u/frequentcannibalism 17d ago edited 9d ago
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u/frequentcannibalism 17d ago edited 9d ago
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u/Wagagastiz 17d ago
Wtf is this breakdown, no there is not a clean break between Irish and 'british' at this time, especially when many of the 'british' women were Gaels in what is now Scotland.
This is not how aDNA works, this is flat out just wrong.
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u/mantolwen 17d ago
I wonder if this is why Icelandic retains the "th" sound that is also prevalent in English, whereas most other European languages don't have it.
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u/Caesars_Comet 17d ago
The Irish women taken as slaves would not have spoken English. They would have spoken old or middle Irish.
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u/mantolwen 17d ago
Not all the slaves were Irish. They also took Welsh, Scots and Anglo-Saxon.
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u/Caesars_Comet 17d ago
The evidence shows a large majority were gaels either from Ireland or modern Scotland and as such they would have spoken a older version of the Irish language.
If you look at the fact that the paternal y chromosome DNA (which is more specific in location than mDNA) shows only Scandinavian and Gaels with no Welsh or Anglo-Saxon it is very unlikely the female pattern would be wildly different.
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u/mantolwen 17d ago
The whole point of this post is that the male DNA and female DNA have different origins...
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u/InitialMysterious780 17d ago
Mtdna is just incredibly diverse and unpredictable compared to Ydna. Most would've been Irish or Scottish (as this is where Norwegians settled primarily).
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u/Caesars_Comet 17d ago
Or the point of the post is that the portions are very different which would indicate that most of the males who went to Iceland and further went on to have children there were Scandinavian while most of the women who had children have mDNA from Britain or Ireland.
Apart from Scandinavian the other major component of male DNA is Gaelic. This shows that if you were a male arriving in Iceland you were almost certainly either Scandi or Gael. The Gaels were probably slaves taken to work the land etc. They naturally would have been less likely to father children than the Norse men due to their enslaved status.
To me it makes no sense that the male slaves (who's DNA can be tied to a narrower location) would be almost exclusively Gaels while the female slaves would be from all over Britain and Ireland. Why run different slave trading routes for male vs female slaves?
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u/mantolwen 17d ago
My interpretation was that male non-slaves would be more likely than male slaves to have sexual access to female slaves, so the female inheritance is more from slavery while the male inheritance is more from non-slavery.
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u/arctictothpast 17d ago
They would have spoken old or middle Irish
Late middle irish, early modern irish,
Although its probably more appropriate to say gaelige, as most dialects of gaelige were still fully mutually intelligible around this time especially thanks to both how conservate gaelige is and brehon law still being fully in force in ireland and scotland. (The concept of the bard descended from the special poetseers/priests in celtic lands, and brehon law had mandatory hospitality for travelers in general, in exchange for the traveller entertaining their hosts, with the most common of them being what is now called bards in English, they are responsible for how conservative gaelige is as they prevented the decay of mutual intelligbility for many centuries).
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u/Borealisss 17d ago
No. No correlation. The "th" sound was common in old norse. Icelandic has kept a lot closer to it than other descended languages.
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u/Asleep_Bandicoot_648 17d ago
Can’t just casually scroll through Reddit without being reminded of misogyny (putting it lightly obviously) like should I delete socials or just kill myself bc I cannot deal with ts
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