Ancient Journeys

Genes in today’s Icelandic population suggest that the Vikings brought back an American Indian woman a thousand years ago.

Genes in today’s Icelandic population suggest that the Vikings brought back an American Indian woman a thousand years ago.

For all the potential for good that mapping the human genome holds, it also gives us a means of studying our past, answering tantalising questions of human origins, migrations and settlements, and not just in the distant past.

To cite one recent example, scientists have been able to use the genome to state with some certainty that not only did Vikings land in North America long before Columbus, at least in one case they brought an American Indian back with them and her genes still survive among the descendants of Vikings in a remote part of Iceland.

The genetic make-up of the human population of Iceland has been one of the most thoroughly mapped in the world, and when researchers from Iceland and Spain zeroed in to analyse the genes of around 80 people from just four families in Iceland, they found a mitochondrial gene (which is passed down along a female line of descent) that is found only in American Indians or East Asians. It was first suspected that these genes may have been introduced through recent intermarriage with East Asians, but researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox says that when family genealogy was studied, it was discovered that the four families descended from ancestors who lived between 1710 and 1740 in the same region of southern Iceland. “As the island (Iceland) was virtually isolated from the 10th century, the most likely hypothesis is that these genes corresponded to an Amerindian woman who was brought from America by the Vikings around the year 1000,” explains Lalueza-Fox.

The research ties in with other evidence of Viking presence in North America from sites such as the one in Newfoundland where remains of Viking huts have been found. But the genetic evidence does more than indicate settlements, it clearly shows a degree of genetic intermixture, and the evidence found in the genes could not be an isolated case.

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Hartosh Singh Bal