January 10, 2011
By Didi
A new study suggests that some Icelanders may be direct descendants of a Native American woman. If this is true, then the Vikings in fact had substantive contact with Native Americans, an unestablished hypothesis until now, and were the first people to bring a Native American to Europe.
The Vikings settled Iceland in the 9th century, and it is now a country of a little fewer than 300,000 people. Since that time, the Icelandic gene pool has remained largely homogenous as a result of long-term isolation. That, combined with Iceland’s meticulous record keeping of its people’s genealogy, makes studying and verifying Icelanders’ genetic make-up an alluring draw to researchers interested in genetic studies.
One such researcher recently published a study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, analyzing the DNA of Icelanders to determine that “a mysterious . . . . DNA sequence (that we name the C1e lineage). . . , carried by more than 80 Icelanders, can be traced through the female line to four ancestors born in Iceland around 1700. There is good reason to believe that the C1e lineage arrived in Iceland several hundreds of years before 1700.”
The C1e lineage can be found in both Native Americans and East Asian populations. However, it is more than likely that the C1e lineage found in Icelanders is linked to Native Americans and that this link was created as far back as the year 1000 A.D. when the Vikings settled in Newfoundland.
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Hånky pånky.