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DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

joh.cam.ac.uk

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Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#81

Post by udp »

drocer88 wrote: post #17
udp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there were populations with significant relict Neanderthal DNA, you'd be looking at more like the Celt/Gaul populations, and talking at least a thousand years before that -- think the British isles, before the Angles/Saxons moved in. And even that is very... speculative history. Very speculative indeed, considering there was plenty of movement of people between the British Isles and the continent before the Angl…

There is significant amounts of Neanderthal genes in British (and all European ) genomes. "Neanderthal-derived DNA was found in the genome of all contemporary populations". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_... See also: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/genetic-data-half-mi... ( Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy ) https://scie…

As you said, all contemporary populations. So there is nothing to suggest that the British Isles was a Neanderthal genetic time capsule prior to occupation by the Anglo-Saxons, Romans, or Celts. Likely all of these incoming populations were equally as Neanderthal as the existing inhabitants.

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#82

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

photonemitter wrote: post #39

So... this isn’t news at all, but rather can be seen as supporting what our (norwegian here) own older tales and historians wrote down around the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimskringla It’s well known we went around, even likely as far as asia (buddha statuettes were found in viking graves) and one of our kings (Harald Hårråde) was commander of the Byzantine royal Guard ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…

Well, at least post a link to that event.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24436598

Fadlan's descriptions don't actually seem so fantastical & embellished to me, maybe he was that rare thing, a historian in the current meaning of the word.

Edit: and it's a truly fascinating read.

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#83

Post by throrthaway »

rbecker wrote: post #49
throrthaway wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A what point? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intrinsic >Do you have a reason to think that means PCA is bad at representing similarity and kinship because of this? I suggest you read up on the definition of "distance" and "similarity" before drinking the PCA kool-aid. You don't get to define an ad hoc distance just because it fits your ideas about ethnicity. But then, I only have the popgen community to…

There's nothing ad hoc about it - PCA is an extremely fundamental statistical tool, and commonly used in genetics, especially to evaluate population structure. A few random examples: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3392282/ https://speciationgenomics.github.io/pca/ https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo... https://www.genetics.org/content/210/2/719 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng…

Yes you don't need to explain my field to me, thank you very much. Are you going to post wikipedia links next? It still doesn't change the fact that PCA is extremely unrigorous for any analysis that goes beyond 'looking at pretty figures'. The vectors are literally and utterly meaningless. They're selected in an ad hoc way for each dataset. If you want to untangle population structure properly there are countless other more rigorous methods, although they are not without their flaws. But the fact that you want to use PC1 and PC2 plots to prove a weird point about ethnicity makes me think you either don't know what you're talking about and are just using the field as a front to advance your weird beliefs. Even Steve Hsu would be more rigorous than that

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#84

Post by 082349872349872 »

atomi wrote: post #64
asveikau wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in history, but it doesn't take much reading to understand that our current national, ethnic, and racial identities are all much more recent than popularly believed, and will likely be in flux again in the future of human history. I do not think that is "2+2 = 5" thinking, that seems to just be what happens over time. I had a few head-scratching moments of realization of this when I was into learnin…

On a related note: Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...

Gaita gallega: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_W24ZpCjY

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#85

Post by 082349872349872 »

bregma wrote: post #15

Should have built a wall across Schleswig-Holstein.

Across which end? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig-Holstein#Duchies_in_...

Edit: in the viking age, the Hamburg end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Empire

TIL thassalocracy is a possible description for 1984's Oceania.

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebaXQjp4OQ

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#86

Post by Razengan »

dang wrote: post #77
cambalache wrote: post #19

I already lost my faith in the cultural "western" elites. I hate to sound like a hardcore conservative (I am pretty leftist) but I dont see there is coming back from the current environment. 2+2 = 5, original English people were actually black, more diversity has been proved to generate better stock performance of the company.From the flimsiest of evidence a whole new narrative is created, one that match the social i…

Please don't go on generic ideological flamewar tangents here. It leads to predictable, tedious, and usually nasty threads. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308 .

What about comments like these, dang?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064

They remain up despite flagging and reporting. What value, in your mind, do these bring?

(I'm mentioning this here since it's a detached thread anyway)

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#88

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

interfixus wrote: post #70
hrafn wrote: post #12

As usual, the university's public relations summary of the paper does not match the claims the paper makes. It makes grandiose claims of debunkings and is written from the point of view of whatever societal issue is popular today (identity and population movement). Link to preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334525855_Populatio... I'm not seeing any claims there that are new. It is cool to have more da…

Project leader professor Eske Willerslev is - as far as I can ascertain - a highly competent and accomplished scientist, but with pattern of political leanings informing his scientific output and media appearances, of which there have been not a few over the years, at least in his native Denmark. From reports of this paper I have so far read, it doesn't really - despite claims - challenge what we know of the vikings,…

Everything is politics, so saying ''politics informs his scientific output'' like it is some kind of gotcha makes absolutely no sense.

And it is necessary to continue to reiterate the same basic facts when new evidence continues to support it. For a variety of reasons all kinds of ideas that have been debunked decades ago about the past are still mainstream. And some people get really angry when current historians tell them that those views are wrong because it clashes with their current political ideas and views. Just look at the pure evil shit Mary Beard, a well-respected classicist, got when she dared say that during Roman times there were black people in England (a well-established fact by now).

Unfortunately the alt-right has also taken hold of the past, and they continue to spread all kinds of lies so they can continue to spread their idea of the past, namely that of a white past where non-white people did not exist (just look at the outrage you see when a medieval fantasy tv show casts non-white actors). So more evidence that Scandinavia was also populated by people from southern Europe and Asia is always welcome (even though it wont do a thing to convince people who hold racist views and ideals).

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#89

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #88
interfixus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project leader professor Eske Willerslev is - as far as I can ascertain - a highly competent and accomplished scientist, but with pattern of political leanings informing his scientific output and media appearances, of which there have been not a few over the years, at least in his native Denmark. From reports of this paper I have so far read, it doesn't really - despite claims - challenge what we know of the vikings,…

Everything is politics, so saying ''politics informs his scientific output'' like it is some kind of gotcha makes absolutely no sense. And it is necessary to continue to reiterate the same basic facts when new evidence continues to support it. For a variety of reasons all kinds of ideas that have been debunked decades ago about the past are still mainstream. And some people get really angry when current historians te…

The fact that Britain and Scandinavia were, in ancient and early Medieval times, actually very diverse places, is interesting, because within living memory those places are /believed/ to have been > 90% "white".

This raises a number of possibilities for where those beliefs come from:

Option 1: It really is true that, around 1950, those places were > 90% "white", but in ancient times they did not used to be. This would mean that the diversity present in ancient times had subsequently been forced out, either via systematic oppression that motivated out-migration, or via active genocide.

Option 2: Census and other data from the past century were systematically falsified, consistently and at a large scale, to support the regime of white supremacy that then dominated Europe, when in fact those populations were considerably more diverse; non-"white" people were just "officially invisible". Moreover, the commonly-reported subjective memories of older people who say they remember such a time are in fact misimpressions -- because memory, as we know, is unreliable, strongly affected by whatever the social reality is.

In other words, either

- large-scale population replacement occurred in these places within just the recent past, or

- the past is tremendously mutable, in which case nothing you understand as history, nor indeed anything you think you remember, can actually be trusted.

Either conclusion would be very compatible with your opening point that everything is really politics.

Re: DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian

#90

Post by goto11 »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #89
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is politics, so saying ''politics informs his scientific output'' like it is some kind of gotcha makes absolutely no sense. And it is necessary to continue to reiterate the same basic facts when new evidence continues to support it. For a variety of reasons all kinds of ideas that have been debunked decades ago about the past are still mainstream. And some people get really angry when current historians te…

The fact that Britain and Scandinavia were, in ancient and early Medieval times, actually very diverse places, is interesting, because within living memory those places are /believed/ to have been > 90% "white". This raises a number of possibilities for where those beliefs come from: Option 1: It really is true that, around 1950, those places were > 90% "white", but in ancient times they did not used to be. This woul…

You are conflating "diverse" with "non-white", but I think that is anachronistic. The non-Scandinavian DNA referred to is from eastern Europe and Baltics, British isles, central and southern Europe and so forth. That is pretty diverse - but all would be considered "white" by present day standards.

Interesting the study also shows no Eskimo, Inuit or Native American DNA. Not surprising, but is would be really cool if there were some Native American DNA among viking-age Scandinavians.

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