Vikings over 1000 years ago To Iceland

Vikings Brought Native Americans to Iceland 1000 Years Ago


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Last Updated: November 23rd, 2010 An interesting study has just surfaced that we wanted to share with you.



The first Native American to arrive in Europe was alleged to be brought by the Vikings over 1,000 years ago to Iceland. This person was thought to be a woman. This finding supported the theory that Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Columbus traveled to the “New World”.



How could this be possible? According to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) which conducted the study, discovered that there are around 80 people from a total of 4 families in Iceland that possessed a type of DNA that is found only in Native Americans or East Asians. “It was thought at first that it came from recently established Asian families in Iceland,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a CSIC researcher.



When family genealogy was studied, it was discovered that the 4 families descended from certain ancestors that lived between 1710-1740 in the same region of southern Iceland. The C1e lineage that is found is also mitochondrial, which means that the genes were introduced to 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.



As published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 75 to 80 percent of contemporary Icelanders can trace their lineage to Scandinavia and the rest to Scotland and Ireland. However, the C1e lineage is one of a handful that was involved in the settlement of the Americas around 14,000 years ago.



In contrast to the initial assumption, the preliminary genealogical analyses revealed that the C1 lineage was present in the Icelandic mitochondrial DNA pool at least 300 years ago. This raised the intriguing possibility that the Icelandic C1 lineage could be traced to Viking voyages to the Americas, the journal said.



Although there were several issues raised concerning the accuracy of this theory, there are still some scholars who think that Mediterranean people were exchanged with the Mayans from the Central America more than 2000 years ago. Still, credits should be given to the researchers and their use of genealogy studies to help determine this possibility.



The researchers used data from the Rejkjavik-based genomics company deCODE Genetics and this report was also published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.







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