First American in Europe 'was native woman kidnapped by Vikings and hauled back to Iceland...'

Daily Mail Online (UK) ^ | November 17, 2010 | NIALL FIRTH

[Albion Wilde]

A native woman kidnapped by the Vikings may have been the first American to arrive in Europe around 1,000 years ago, according to a startling new study.

The discovery of a gene found in just 80 Icelanders links them with early Americans who may have been brought back to Iceland by Viking raiders.

The discovery means that the female slave was in Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus first paraded American Indians through the streets in Spain after his epic voyage of discovery in 1492...

[SunkenCiv]

Her name was Cecelia, but after the Viking lopped over part of one of her legs, everyone just called her Eileen.

[Syncro]

Was she a Caucasian?

Caucasians were in North America before the “Indians”

[bigheadfred]

So much for my romantical notions.

[JerseyHighlander]

From the article: “The team found that the genes they studied can be traced to common ancestors in the south of Iceland, near the Vatnajˆkull glacier, in around 1710.”

How can they possibly rule out a 16th to 17th century sailor bringing back a native wife after being safe harbored in North American during an Outer Banks or Coastal N.American fishing/whaling expedition or merchant vessel?

All that would be needed to make that plausible is the contemporary social stigma of marrying an outsider being so great that the sailor didn’t or couldn’t record the marriage with the Icelandic church registers.

[Albion Wilde]

Was she a Caucasian? Caucasians were in North America before the “Indians”

That's a new wrinkle. I had not thought of that before. Here is Wikipedia's explanation of Caucasoid physiology; from this you can imagine that Caucasians may have crossed over into Alaska or made their way west into the Euro-Atlantic islands:

"Caucasoid race" is a term formerly used in physical anthropology to refer to people of a certain range of anthropometric measurements. Conceived as one of the "great races", alongside Mongoloid and Negroid, it was taken to consist of a number of "subraces". The Caucasoid peoples were usually divided in three groups on linguistic grounds, termed Aryan (Indo-European), Semitic (Semitic languages) and Hamitic (Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian).

The postulated subraces vary depending on the author, including but not limited to Nordic, Mediterranean, Alpine, Dinaric, East Baltic, Arabid, Turanid, Iranid and Armenoid subraces.

19th century classifications of the peoples of India considered the Dravidians of non-Caucasoid stock as Australoid or a separate Dravida race, and assumed a gradient of miscegenation of high-caste Caucasoid Aryans and indigenous Dravidians.

By contrast, Carleton S. Coon in his 1939 The Races of Europe classified the Dravidians as Caucasoid as well, due to his assessment of what he called their "Caucasoid skull structure" and other physical traits (e.g. noses, eyes, hair). In his The Living Races of Man, Coon stated that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasian racial region". Sarah A Tishkoff and Kenneth K Kidd state: "Despite disagreement among anthropologists, this classification remains in use by many researchers, as well as lay people."

There was no universal consensus of the validity of the "Caucasian" grouping even within scientific racism. Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870 wrote that the "absurd denomination of 'Caucasian'" was in fact a conflation of his Xanthochroi and Melanochroi types.

In 1920 H.G. Wells referred to the Mediterranean race as the Iberian race . He regarded it as a fourth subrace of the Caucasian race, along with the Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic subraces. He stated that the main ethnic group that most purely represented the racial stock of the Iberian race was the Basques, and that the Basques were the descendants of the Cro-Magnons.

Europaeid types
Here they are. Personally, I think the Celts should be their own type:

[Albion Wilde]

This thread is getting very interesting. Ping to illustrations on post 65.

[Lee'sGhost]

Love this stuff. Love this ping list.

Thanks, folks.

[truth_seeker]

Off topic, but...

My great grandparents were both 100% from Sweden.

Both had dark hair, and my Dad joked a lot that his ancestors had been to the coast of Spain.

[Albion Wilde]

In Ferdinand Columbus' biography of his father Christopher, he says that in 1477 his father saw in Galway, Ireland two dead bodies which had washed ashore in their boat.

Having stood on that Galway shore one New Year's eve, I find it so fascinating to imagine Columbus having been there. The only bodies we saw laying about were drunks.

[Albion Wilde]

BTW if you accidentally lopped her legs off she would have bled out very quickly. You would be hauling a half of a dead body in that longboat. And there weren't a lot of runaway slaves in Iceland. Nowhere to run.

Women were expected to do daily hard physical work in those days, especially in cold countries.

[Albion Wilde]

My great grandparents were both 100% from Sweden. Both had dark hair, and my Dad joked a lot that his ancestors had been to the coast of Spain.

Yep. And consider the "black Irish" -- blue or green eyes, fair skin and black hair.

[truth_seeker]

“Yep. And consider the “black Irish” — blue or green eyes, fair skin and black hair.”

I have read various takes on “black Irish” but at least some of the native Irish stock migrated from Iberia.

Sticking with the Scandinavians alone, their wide travels during their Viking heyday have been fairly well mapped.

Swedes through Russia, Ukraine to Turkey. (Words “Rus” and “slav” derive from nordic-Germanic language).

The coast of the Mediterranean. Norwegians, Danes west along the Atlantic coast, to Paris, and west to North America.

Erik’s band were settled in North America for a few years. No telling if the donor of the Indian dna went under duress, or freely.

[blam]

Vintage Skulls

"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."

Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans."

[blam]

"I have read various takes on “black Irish” but at least some of the native Irish stock migrated from Iberia."

The majority of Europeans migrated (wave after wave) out of the Iberian Ice Age refuge when Europe began to warm up. If you're really interested in the subject, this is a must read:

The Origins Of The British

[blam]

Kuelap - The Machu Picchu Of Northern Peru (Chachapoyas - White, blonde haired people)

[afraidfortherepublic]

What’s in YOUR wallet?

[colorado tanker]

Didn't the Norse colony on Greenland fall to the Inuit in the late Middle Ages

I've heard that theory but I've seen no evidence to support it. The consensus today seems to be the settlements declined as the Little Ice Age came on until the last residents evacuated.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks LG!

[21twelve]

My grandparents were all from Norway. My dad said the same about his father who had brown eyes, black hair and olive skin. Thought for sure he had the blood of some Mediteranian beauty taken on a pillage.

Until dad went up north and visited with the Sami (sp?). He came back and said “Oh - now I know where dad got his features!”

[bigheadfred]

Women were expected to do daily hard physical work in those days

And that is exactly my point. To go viking, or to go a-viking generally means raiding and piracy. As a Berserker, my mission is to storm the village, slaughter everything that moves, and if there is anyone left living, they are prolly gonna end up as thralls in my stead back home

Lopping off her legs is just for illustration. Someone who is maimed so badly they can't work would prolly be killed.

I don't think she was part of any type of trade or anything else. If the Norse were on friendly trading missions, looking for brides or just a nice beach for some barbecue and volleyball, then why didn't they do more trading thru the years? There would be more than a couple of stories hinting at Europeans in America then. There would be more than a trace of American Indian DNA in Iceland. By now, it would be EVERYWHERE.

I think encounters between Indians and Vikings ended up in bloodshed.

As an aside, a guy in the cabinet shop got his fingers CHEWED OFF below the middle knuckles, all four of them, on his right hand, doing a stupid thing on the shaper with a stacked cutter set. You would have been amazed at how LITTLE they bled.