Free Republic

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...

Sometimes it takes a punch to the gut or a slap in the face. For many “civilized” people the instinct is to deescalate, to appease an adversary, based on the belief that civilized people do their best to avoid fights. It’s a tactic that is smart when dealing with other civilized people. Generally speaking, fighting is a losing proposition, and if you can resolve a dispute by talking and compromise the chances that the costs of compromise will be lower than the costs of fighting are high. But this instinct is wrong, even stupid when dealing with uncivilized people. Their...

The University of Helsinki announced Monday the institution will confer climate change activist Greta Thunberg with an honorary Doctorate of Theology. In its news release, the Finland-based university called the honorary degree its “highest recognition,” and 20-year-old Thunberg of Sweden is one of 30 individuals set to be honored as part of the school’s annual graduation ceremonies this May. The announcement came just one day before a Swedish court gave Thunberg and hundreds of other climate activists approval “to proceed with a class action lawsuit against the Swedish state for ‘insufficient climate policy,'” Reuters reported. “Thunberg, and 600 other young...

A nine-year-old Swedish girl was the victim of a brutal murder attempt at a playground in the Swedish industrial town of Skellefteå. A 13-year-old Ethiopian boy, already notorious in the community, has been accused of the crime by local police. The little girl remains in a coma, with photos released by the family showing her surrounded by stuffed animals in a local hospital bed. The teen suspect, who was granted permanent residence status just a week before the attack, beat the young girl at 5:30 p.m. last Thursday at the Morö Backe school. Police and emergency services arrived on scene...

Man lying on his belly with another man using a weapon on his back. (Stora Hammar Stone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Hammars_stones#/media/File:Sacrificial_scene_on_Hammars_(II).png Famed for their swift longboats and bloody incursions, Vikings have long been associated with brutal, over-the-top violence. Between the eighth and 11th centuries, these groups left their Nordic homelands to make their fortunes by trading and raiding across Europe. Particularly infamous is the so-called "blood eagle", a gory ritual these warriors are said to have performed on their most hated enemies. The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim's back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were...

Previous studies had indicated that while most mammoths likely died out around 10,000 years ago, a few had managed to survive in small populations on remote islands off the coast of Siberia. There had even been suggestions that some of these isolated island populations had held on until around 4,000 years ago. Now though, the results of a ten-year study involving the collection and analysis of 535 samples of sediment and permafrost from Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia have yielded evidence to suggest that mammoths had still been roaming the wilds of mainland Siberia as recently as 3,900 years ago....

Finland has joined Sweden, Denmark and Norway in either banning or discouraging young adults or teens from getting the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, because of the increased risk of myocarditis — heart inflammation.Dr. Hanna Nohynek, chief physician at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, had told the media a decision was coming down Thursday. Finland's health authorities announced that men under 30 will not get the Moderna shot, and should get the Pfizer vaccine instead. Sweden banned Moderna for people under the age of 30, and Denmark did the same for people under 18. Instead of issuing a ban, Norway...

A significant new find of golden artifacts, many of them with runes in the Elder Futhark, has been uncovered in Denmark.Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus.Major New Runes Find in Denmark | Jackson Crawford | September 15, 2021

(...) Denmark, Norway and Iceland have temporarily suspended the use of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine over concerns about patients developing post-jab blood clots, as the manufacturer and the European Medicines Agency insisted the vaccine was safe. The EMA said that information available so far indicated the risk of blood clots in those vaccinated against the coronavirus was "no higher than that seen in the general population." It also said that European countries could keep using the AstraZeneca vaccine while the issue was investigated, concluding that "the vaccine's benefits continue to outweigh its risks". Denmark, the first to announce it was suspending...

Americans, especially young, left-leaning Americans don’t have much of a conception of the reality of socialism. They have some idea that it means the government taxing the wealthy and providing “free” (read: taxpayer-funded) services to those that are left fortunate. That is completely wrong. In fact, it’s a semi-rosy view of how the Nordic welfare systems work, and those aren’t even socialist systems in the first place. Plus, they tax everyone quite heavily, not just the upper class; the average tax in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark is between 40% and 60%, but it is a more or less flat tax....

On this date in 1854, two Sami men were beheaded for Norway’s Kautokeino Rebellion. The indigenous Sami people — often known as Lapps, although this nomenclature is not preferred by the Sami themselves — had by this point become territorially assimilated to the states of the Scandinavian peninsula across which their ancestral homeland had once spanned. The material benefits of this association for the Sami were much less apparent. In Norway — our focus for this post — Sami shared little of the economic growth in the 19th century save for a startling proliferation of alcoholism. In the 1840s a...

Genetic markers for the Clan MacDougall... descends from Dougall, King of the Isle of Man and founder of the ancient Scottish Kingdom of the Isles and Lorn. Dougall (c1140-c1207) was the eldest son of Somerled, the ancient warrior sea-king and progenitor of the MacDonald, MacAllister, and MacDougall clans. Somerled expelled his Scoto-Norse rivals from Argyll, Kintyre and the Isles but was himself a Norseman paternally, having a genetic signature that is more common in Scandinavia than in Scotland. The first genetic signature for Somerled was discovered and published in 2005 by researchers at the University of Oxford, and since then,...

One might think that our experience with the coronavirus has given Americans a scary foretaste of radical socialism. Empty shelves, shortages and limits on basic commodities, economic stagnation, and all of this combined with a sustained assault on our privacy, our freedom of assembly and our religious freedom. We have endured on a temporary basis what some socialist societies typically provide on a permanent basis. Yet the socialist gang is still out there — Bernie and the Squad — touting the virtues of socialism. And they’re pulling the Democratic Party in their direction, with Biden now climbing on the free...

Archaeological remains have shown that in the middle part the Stone Age, there were at least three different but partially contemporary cultural groups in Sweden. The groups are often called: Funnel Beaker culture, which is associated with Scandinavia's first farmers; Pitted Ware culture, which is mainly linked to fishing and hunting; and Battle Axe culture, which represents a blended culture of herding and farming... The researchers have analysed DNA from 25 Stone Age individuals from four Pitted Ware culture burial grounds on Gotland. About half of the individuals were buried in typical Pitted Ware culture graves and the other half...

Earth's last Glacial Maximum period began around 33,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets covered much of the Northern Hemisphere. At the time, the Eurasian ice sheet -- which covered much of Scandinavia -- contained approximately three times the amount of frozen water held in the modern-day Greenland ice sheet. But rapid regional warming saw the ice sheet collapse over a period of just 500 years, according to authors of the study published in Nature Geoscience. Analysing sediment drill cores from the Norwegian Sea, the team found that the ice sheet's collapse contributed to an event known as Meltwater 1A...

Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says he wants to transform America into Scandinavia. In a recent town hall, Sanders argued, like every freshman student after reading a page of “State and Revolution,” that what happened in the Soviet Union was not “real socialism” but “authoritarian communism.”“When we talk about democratic socialism, I’m talking about Finland, I’m talking about Denmark, I’m talking about Sweden,” Sanders said. “And communism, whether in Cuba, whether in the Soviet Union … was marked by totalitarianism, was marked by throwing millions of people into the Gulag.”This is a trope, a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, that...

Scandinavian countries are well-known for their broad social safety net and their public funding of services such as universal healthcare, higher education, parental leave, and child and elderly care. High levels of public spending naturally require high levels of taxation. In 2018, Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio was at 44.9 percent, Norway’s at 39.0 percent, and Sweden’s at 43.9 percent. This compares to a ratio of 24.3 percent in the United States. So how do Scandinavian countries raise their tax revenues? A first breakdown shows that consumption taxes and social security contributions—both taxes with a very broad base—raise much of the additional...

Bernie Sanders supporters are quick to make clear that their guy doesn’t want to turn America into Cuba or Venezuela or the old Soviet Union. By “democratic socialism,” the US senator from Vermont means Scandinavia, more or less. And what’s wrong with that? The Nordic nations are pretty nice. Even President Trump has conceded that Norway produces a quality immigrant. I could do on and on, mentioning how the Nordics score highly in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, especially when it comes to government regulation. They’re also free traders, unlike Sanders, who opposed the North American Free Trade...

If you believe that a large man in a red suit can fly around the world on a sleigh guided by reindeer and deliver presents to billions of homes on Christmas Eve, then you should also believe in Scandinavian socialism. In other words, the Nordic countries' proclivity for socialism is about as real as Santa Claus living at the North Pole with his army of toy-making elves. Even though prominent politicians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) would like you to believe that the Scandinavian countries are socialist utopias, the exact opposite is actually true....

SKAERSOGAARD, Denmark — On a mild autumn morning, Sven Moesgaard climbed a sunbathed hill and inspected an undulating expanse of neatly planted vines. A picking crew was harvesting tons of hardy Solaris grapes that he would soon turn into thousands of bottles of crisp white and sparkling Danish wine. A decade ago, winemaking was regarded as a losing proposition in these notoriously cool climes. But as global temperatures rise, a fledgling wine industry is growing from once-unlikely fields across Scandinavia, as entrepreneurs seek to turn a warming climate to their advantage. “We’re looking for the opportunities in climate change,” said...