Iceland didn’t originally set out to complete a Scandinavian genetics history puzzle. They were initially working on studies focused on archaeological sites such as Viking burial chambers.
The team’s goal eventually became documenting how past migrations affect the present day Scandinavian gene pool, to better understand the region’s genetic structure.
A closer look revealed some regional differences in the timing and amounts of gene flow from three locations: the eastern Baltic, the British-Irish Isles, and southern Europe. During the Viking period, British-Irish ancestry was widespread in Scandinavia, compared to eastern Baltic ancestry which was more localized to the Swedish island of Gotland and central Sweden.
The team believes that a drop in current levels of non-Scandinavian ancestry might be because those brought to the region contributed proportionately less to the modern gene pool than they did during the Viking andIt is also possible that the Viking migration from the west impacted all of Scandinavia and that the migration from the east was more based on sex, with the movement of primarily female people to the region.
Overall, the findings show that the Viking period in Scandinavia was a very dynamic time, with a lot of movement of people. Some next steps of this work includes studying genetic data to reveal how and why the ancestries that arrived during the Viking period were later diluted. “We need more pre-Viking individuals from north Scandinavia to investigate when the Uralic ancestry enter in this region,”
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