Knowing More Than Ever with DNA

DNA is such a useful tool in trying to understand everything from looks down to culture in some cases. Deoxyribonucleic acid (aka DNA) is the building block of both living and nonliving organisms (ie: viruses) and determines heredity as well as looks.

If the one of the things you remembered from school is the Punnett square, it becomes relevant later in this post. That's not just because a blood type AB and blood type B couple can't have an type O child. This is more about looks and what is carried in the phenotype genetics.

Moving along, DNA has helped us understand more about the Vikings (and by proxy Norsemen) and how they actually looked. When you think of Vikings you probably think of Chris Hemsworth's Marvel character Thor, right? Large men with long blonde hair, having a muscular build with little to no fat and piercing light-colored eyes? Well, you'd be wrong. DNA evidence combined with archeological finds show a different story. Such that, what is more accurate would be portrayals you might see in other media such as the video game God of War. While God of War still didn't have a truly realistic description of what Norsemen (and by proxy Vikings) looked like, the body types were more accurate. While not all Vikings were Norsemen, a majority of them were. DNA evidence shows that they were likely mostly brunette and had bigger builds than what we are used to seeing in popular media. Instead of bodybuilders, think of what modern strongmen look like. In addition, based on information taken from burial sites, it seems as though the Vikings didn't intermingle with attacked and conquered peoples as we once thought which is an incredible find.

In school, you may have been taught that Vikings would take the women from any places that they conquered, but DNA evidence begs to differ. This would also explain why there weren't blonde haired and blue-eyed Vikings; if mom and dad are both brunettes with green or brown eyes, the children produced from the parents are more than likely going to be a brunette with green or brown eyes, which brings up back to our Punnett square.

Something else that was interesting from the DNA finds was that Vikings were not just of Scandinavian descent, but there was presence of Asian and Southern European genes in their genetic ancestry. Combined with clear evidence of culture exchange based on what was found in some of the burial sites, it seems that Vikings were more sophisticated than what was previously assumed. The more you know!

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