‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)

Pfft, ICE agents wish they were pirates.

In other parts of the world, plenty of people romanticize ancestry with Ghenghis Khan too.

Everyone loves being seen to be on the ‘winning’ side sometimes, (and there is always a counter-culture minority!) and when sufficiently remote in time, no one is going to really ‘feel’ the atrocities. Then it’s all about marketing and current social whims.

If the Nazi’s won, the current 80/20 pro/anti ratio would be flipped no question.

You don’t have to go very far back in history to see that humans have some pretty dark tendencies.

> rather than Scandinavian

Strange, being in North America, I've yet to meet anyone identify themself as having viking blood, but we refer to Scandinavians as being of viking ancestry all the time.

The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.

This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.

It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.

The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.

It's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.