DNA reveals Vikings who invaded Britain were actually returning to their homeland

The Vikings were, among other things, Nordic raiders, plunderers and slaughterers intent on conquering England.

They also may have been a tad homesick.

There’s long been a belief that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who scuffled with Roman gladiators in the fourth century.

And after the first binge-drinking Danish Vikings got to Britain in the eighth century, the DNA of these bloodthirsty buccaneers who raped and pillaged their way to glory got into the British gene pool.

But the remains of a man found in York could rewrite history altogether.

York is famous for Vikings, with the city captured by surprisingly peaceful Viking farmers and craftsmen in 866.

So the 25% man’s ancestry being Scandinavian might not be too much of a shock. Except that the man lived between the second and fourth centuries — long before Norse rule – and was likely a Roman soldier or gladiator.

‘This highlights that there were people with Scandinavian ancestry in Britain earlier than the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods which started in the fifth century AD,’ the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research centre in London that made the discovery, said.

The institute’s findings, published in the journal Nature, are part of a large-scale study to map how people moving around Europe shapes ancestry.

By analysing thousands of human remains in mainland Europe between 1 and 1,000 CE, they found three distinct waves of migration after the Romans crumbled at the start of the first millennium.

Two waves saw people from northern Germany or Scandinavia – the seafaring Vikings included – pack their bags and move to western, central and eastern Europe.

However, the team found evidence of a migration between the two taking place from 500 to 800 AD that saw people move in the opposite direction, with some Europeans moving northwards into Scandinavia.

When looking at the teeth of people buried on the Swedish island of Öland, for example, scientists found people who carried ancestry from Central Europe who had grown up locally.

This suggests, they said, ‘that this northward influx of people wasn’t a one-off, but a lasting shift in ancestry’.

DNA is a tricky thing to get a grip on. While tracking big changes – such as between humans today and the ape-like creatures we evolved from – can be done, subtle shifts over a few hundred years between genetically similar people are a tall order.

‘Twigstats’, as the researchers dubbed their new technique, could change all of that.

Experts peeked into 1,500 genomes from people who lived in Europe in the first millennium to see how many shared the same genetic mutations.

Overtime, the scientists made family trees with every ‘twig’ being a tiny change in DNA – hence the name.

‘Twigstats allows us to see what we couldn’t before, in this case migrations all across Europe originating in the north of Europe in the Iron Age, and then back into Scandinavia before the Viking Age,’ said Leo Speidel, the lead author of the study and a group leader at Riken, a research institute in Japan.

‘Our new method can be applied to other populations across the world and hopefully reveal more missing pieces of the puzzle.’

Peter Heather, a professor of medieval kistory at King’s College London, and co-author of the study, added: ‘Historical sources indicate that migration played some role in the massive restructuring of the human landscape of western Eurasia in the second half of the first millennium AD which first created the outlines of a politically and culturally recognisable Europe, but the nature, scale and even the trajectories of the movements have always been hotly disputed. 

‘Twigstats opens up the exciting possibility of finally resolving these crucial questions.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.