Posted on 01/08/2006 2:12:41 PM PST by blam
What a Viking's smile revealed
07 January 2006
VIKING warriors may have filed deep grooves into their teeth to indicate class or military rank.
Caroline Arcini of Sweden's National Heritage Board analysed 557 skeletons from four major Viking-age Swedish cemeteries and discovered that around 10 per cent of men, but none of the women, bore horizontal grooves across the upper front teeth.
The marks, which were cut deep into the enamel, are often found in pairs or triplets and appear precisely made. They might have marked certain men as members of a group of tradesmen or warriors, or signified their ability to withstand pain, says Arcini, who published her findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20164). Most of the men bearing the grooves were young, but in the absence of any distinctive injuries or artefacts buried with the skeletons, the exact reason for the marks remains a mystery.
This is the first known case of tooth filing in Europe, but it was common practice in the Americas between AD 800 and 1050. Since the skeletons date from around the same time, this raises the possibility that the Vikings picked up the practice during their travels. Arcini hopes future finds will reveal where the practice arose and how it spread.
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The Vikings at that point were only slightly more advanced then the locals. The Viking had swords but that is only a slight advance over a spear. And vikings did not really fight as a unit. They fought as warriors not as solders. So they had no tactical advantage and only slight technological advantage. They were not on familiar ground and they were at a numerical disadvantage.
Advantage, the skraelings.
Never got on the wrong side of a redhead...particularly her gun. ;-)
Good point. These people weren't as stupid as the elitist academia makes them out to be. Grinding down your teeth for a show of some kind of prowess could be a death sentence back then.
Grinding them down during necessary tasks for the tribe's survival is another story.
clever...very clever
So9
"Handling" the Indians, especially before smallpox, would have been very difficult without gunpowder. Figure that any Indians living up in the tough climate of Newfoundland were as physically tough as the Vikings. Figure, too, that they'd be much better adapted to the country, know what to eat, etc.
The Vikings didn't have any appreciable advantage in missile weapons or in toughness (Amerindians were not pacifist, celibate monks living in monasteries, but savage warriors and hunters; the Vikings were tame and settled compared to them).
Figure the Vikings would have to plant things to eat, which the Indians could easily burn.
Trying to populate North America pre-smallpox, pre-gunpowder would have been a losing affair, I'd expect. And all the moreso if you're trying to settle Newfoundland and Labrador. Sure, Vikings come from cold country too, but they KNEW that cold country, and were settled there, had farms and livestock, etc. No livestock to capture in North America. Farming L'Anse aux Meadows was apt to be grim business.
It was probably a bridge too far for the Vikings to pull off, and what promise was there in the place anyway? Greenland and Iceland were essentially unpopulated, so the Vikings could sail in and set up shop. But Vinland was swarming with savages more savage than the Vikings, reproducing like rabbits, with nothing to trade, and it was a frozen hellhole to boot.
Almost proof positive the Vikings were here long before Columbus.
Nope!
I think the advent of the Little Ice Age is what doomed the outlying settlements. The first settlements began during the Medieval Warm Period, but when the Ice Age set in they were frozen out and cut off (the local aborigines and the plague behind them in Europe didn't help either.)
I'm one of those redhead/blond people with white skin to the point of opacity (truly, I'm about as "white" a person as anyone can be and I never tan, just burn, so I avoid the sun at all costs), green eyes, taller than the average female, but after reading the "Redheads are Neanderthals" thread, my long arms and long legs and high forehead/brow defy me as being Neanderthal. Other than that I have always been an incredibly strong person, for a female.
My Scot grandfather was the source, I am told, of my coloring because my siblings all have dark brown hair and blue eyes, as did both my parents.
I've always been curious about the Neanderthals, like many of us modern homo sapiens, and think that there's certainly some liklihood that they interbred with other species, rather than simply "going extinct" otherwise.
Thus, the persistence of my red-to-blond hair, and complexion...
"I think the advent of the Little Ice Age is what doomed the outlying settlements."
There was an archaleologic show (Discovery channel??) about this that I found interesting. When the Viking settlements died off in Greenland the cold weather made farming harder/impossible to support enough people. The locals (inuit-type???) adapted and did their whale/seal/hunting stuff. The Vikings by then had become Christian. I'm thinking the archaelogist had some type of evidence (or it may have been speculation) that the Vikings didn't go for the "heathen" rituals involved before and after the hunts, and therefore died off and/or abandoned the settlements.
It's not really hard to outrun a 400lb man and his 200lb old lady riding a 800lb motorcycle with a windshield jutting straight up that is mounted to the handlebars.
Put some Jap carbs and an American made breakerless ignition on your Britbike. End of problems as long as you have those crown faced roller bearings on your center mainless crankshaft.
that is a great book!
Okay. Ditch the Amals and the Lucas...And my Matchless already has a center main....Good to go.
From if your Finnish...
If a man has sex with another man, he's a homosexual. (Or, in more urban circles, maybe a bisexual or an ultra-modern gender-blender.) And if you are middle-aged or older, you believe that most Swedish men are gay.
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