- Feb 27, 2019
- 569
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I know how it goes from other threads... It usually doesn't stop and people will want to smart ass and argue despite very little knowledge.
True, nobody is denying that. We also know where these wifes or concubines came from mainly: the Baltics and the British Isles. There is influx from other areas too, but it's not significant compared to the above mentioned areas.
Indeed, trading hubs are towns with ports. Returning Viking raiding parties sold their plundered goods there (including kidnapped and enslaved people from abroad), before returning home. So the interbreeding most often happened in these trade hubs and stayed there... The Nordic inhabitants of these towns with ports were much more likely to interbreed with enslaved people from abroad than the average population living in the countryside.
The study was teamwork and he doesn't say, that the study was bollocks. He just says, that the dataset of gene-samples was flawed by incldung a lot of non-Viking DNA to it (for the reasons mentioned in my previous posts) and this led to misleading conclusions. Apart from that, I can wholeheartedly second Yngling's statement:
That's indeed a good thing, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to make a lot of these conlcusions from DNA-samples, if everyones' genes were already too mixed up. He means it from a scientific point of view. Like for example Iceland, the inhabitants of Iceland are a real treasure for genetic scientists, because of the isolation of this population. Not much immigration happened over centuries, so a lot of the original gene pool (early medieval / "Viking Age" Norwegian settlers mostly) was preserved.
Apart from that and as a personal remark, according to the United Nations (UN) indigenous people are protected and have a right to keep to themselves, their protected spaces are off-limit for everyone else. (Google it, if you don't believe me, it's international law). Nobody is going nuts about that. But if a white guy (minority on this planet btw, just ~10 % of the world's population are white) says something similar it's suddenly racism or what? Oh the hypocrisy...
You assume, that the early medieval world was quite similiar to today's world and that's why you make a wrong conclusion here. Today at least in developed countries the percentage of urbanization is extremely high and still growing. In Europe according to a statistic from 2021, 77,7 % of Europeans are living in cities and towns today.
But in the Middle Age it was the other way around. Only a small minority lived in urban centers (like the above mentioned trade hubs), the vast majority of people lived in the countryside (estimates are around 90 % for the Middle Age). This is also the reason, why the interbreeding with other European people in those larger towns with ports/trade hubs didn't influence Scandinavia as a whole that much genetically.
It's not true that most Vikings were living close to the coast and I wonder where you've got that from? Most lived in the countryside as 90 % of European population in the the Middle Age did. But life was hard in the countryside and so was work. Hunger was a constant threat. So many gladly took the opportunity to join one of the Viking raiding parties in the next port occasionally in order to make a small fortune and improve their living conditions. The risk was low in the beginning anyway, because Vikings used hit & run tactics. It took many decades until mainland Europe found an answer to these highly mobile Viking attacks from the sea and until they had organized a defense system against such attacks. After a successful raid most Vikings returned back home in the countryside.
That's why it is problematic, that hardly any samples from the countryside were part of the DNA study.
Btw you can't transport that many captured/enslaved people on a longship. These were fast vessels, not transport ships. So you would really only take the strongest and most healthy males for manual labor back home or just the most beautiful and also most healthy women (in small quantities), next to the stolen valuables/plundered goods, the equipment of the crew and not to forget the food rations you had to store on the ship. Since most Vikings were common people, most weren't able to feed a slave. So they would sell them for coin in the very next port at home, before returning home.
I didn't react to your post previously, because I thought my replies to DreamBig Games covers your post, too. I also lack the time to respond to everyone.
I'm being historic here and you base your statement about the phenotype of Vikings on the already mentioned flawed and misinterpreting mainstream media coverage of the genetic study from 2019. There is and was a clear appearance of Nordic people and it's not dark haired with dark eyes (there are always exceptions to a rule, yes, but the big majority clearly wasn't dark haired and dark eyed).
That's only partly true, because a beauty ideal doesn't say that much about the likelihood. In many modern day northern and central European countries blonde hair is rather common, but also very much popular and still seen as a sign of beauty. Hence many dark haired woman dye their hair blonde to look more pretty / attractive.
This is also true for southern Europe where blonde hair isn't common at all. A lot of f.e. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Greek women dye their hair blonde in order to look more desirable.
Blonde has been a beauty ideal in all Germanic societies from ancient times onwards and still is today. But also in many non-Germanic historic and modern societies alike blonde still is a beauty ideal, despite not being common. For example ancient Greeks found blonde to be very much fascinating and even more ancient Romans highly valued blonde hair (there was even a high demand for blonde wigs from Celtic and Germanic women, Roman patricians loved to wear).
Modern day California is only ~ 40 % percent white, natural blonde hair is a northern European trait, so the percentage of natural blondes (a minority of the white minority) in modern day California is very low, but still you will see a lot of (fake) blondes in California, because many dye their hair in order to fulfil the beauty ideal.
It's exactly how genes work. Genes disappear if the population is very small. It's true that recessive genes are carried on for quite some time, despite not showing up in the phenotype, but they will die out at some point! Blonde populations do disappear; not because the relevant gene patterns will be extinct (which is of course wrong), but because the fraction of suppressed occurances is constantly increasing (by interbreeding with a majority of dark haired people). And, yes, this has to do with recessive inheritance. Whether or not the relevant gene combinations survive is absolutely pointless if they lose their chance to appear!
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