Mitochondrial dna is only passed down matrilineally, meaning that Viking women procreated with Native American men and that those children grew up in and spent their lives in the New World.
As to why the meme uses the shocked/horrified expression for this information I have no idea. Maybe they think that the indigenous men kept the Viking women as sex slaves or that they’re realizing that this implies permanent Viking colonies in the New World which undermines a lot of how North American history is conventionally understood by the layperson.
Also this is like… idk Carl Carlson from the Simpsons. He’s ethnically Norwegian for some reason, right?
I think your explanation makes more sense given the context of the meme, it didn’t occur to me that “found in” meant literally that the people those DNA sequences were located in Europe. I took it as a more colloquial meaning, “these DNA sequences are found in Europe” meaning that they’re native to Europe.
Some of the native groups which inhabited the regions of North America which Vikings visited don't exist anymore. They died out in-between the Viking trips to North America and the later discovery of the New World. For example indigenous Greenlanders are a different group of people who migrated into the region after the collapse of the medieval Norse colony there.
Youre talking about the inuit right? And how can they be indigenous if they migrated?
You want the real answer? Because indigenous is a stupidly imprecise word to describe native people which glosses over which native group took which land or migrated to their land however recently and it essentially boils down to just meaning non-western/didn't cross the ocean on boats to get here.
Fools_errand49 is right. Just to give a glance at the various cultures discovered there from the Wikipedia page:
"The earliest known cultures in Greenland are the Saqqaq culture (2500–800 BCE)[2] and the Independence I culture in northern Greenland (2400–1300 BCE). The practitioners of these two cultures are thought to have descended from separate groups that came to Greenland from North America, nearby Nunavut.[3] Around 800 BCE, the so-called Independence II culture arose in the region where the Independence I culture had previously existed.[4] It was originally thought that Independence II was succeeded by the early Dorset culture (700 BCE–CE 1), but some Independence II artefacts date from as recently as the 1st century BCE. Recent studies suggest that, in Greenland at least, the Dorset culture may be better understood as a continuation of Independence II culture; the two cultures have therefore been designated "Greenlandic Dorset".[5] Artefacts associated with early Dorset culture in Greenland have been found as far north as Inglefield Land on the west coast and the Dove Bay area on the east coast.[6]
After the Early Dorset culture disappeared by around CE 1, Greenland was apparently uninhabited until Late Dorset people settled on the Greenlandic side of the Nares Strait around 700 CE.[5] The late Dorset culture in the north of Greenland lasted until about 1300.[7] Meanwhile, the Norse arrived and settled in the southern part of the island in 980."
Humans move all the time. How many generations does it take for you to be considered native? The answer to that question entirely depends on who you talk to and the context. Me for example have ancestry spanning Europe but my family has been America for several generations so I ask am I native to this land or an outsider
Sure, but it also says that this DNA is found in Native American groups, so logically it must be found in North America as well. It seems the post is grammatically flawed, which is why people are having trouble interpreting it.
"Most surprisingly, we demonstrate that the Icelandic C1 lineage does not belong to any of the four known Native American (C1b, C1c, and C1d) or Asian (C1a) subclades of haplogroup C1. Rather, it is presently the only known member of a new subclade, C1e. While a Native American origin seems most likely for C1e, an Asian or European origin cannot be ruled out."
That may be what the article says, but the post isn’t necessarily correctly interpreting the article. I’m only referring to what is in the post itself. I am not familiar with the article, and cannot address it.
No I think logically it must mean that this DNA is only found in people with Native American genetics who are born in Europe, because the interpretation that it’s just grammatically incorrect would also mean it doesn’t make any point of note, why would it be meaningful to point out that this DNA is found in everyone of that group regardless of geography? Wouldn’t that just be the first panel? If that’s the case then why is the guy in the second panel expressing shock??
"For instance, a recent paper provided evidence of the presence of Amerindian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) within a family line in Iceland. It appears that at least one of the early Norse travelers to North America brought a wife back to Iceland (Ebenesersdóttir et al., 2011). ...".
This is the hypothesis they believe to be most likely.
Mitochondrial DNA is passed only from mother to children (male and female children, but only female children will pass it on) so the mitochondrial DNA allegedly found in this case is seen in European’s DNA (it is not “found only in Europe” but it did originate in Europe)
u/ialsoagree is right. The dna in question originated in Europe and was newly found in NA. I don’t know of any such study so I don’t believe it’s real, this would be all over the news. probably just a racist pseudoscientists fantasy about white people being the natural and rightful inhabitants of NA.
Edit: since yall want to keep linking this, lemme break it down in advance: the meme refers to European mtDNA being discovered in an Indigenous American sample. mtDNA is only passed down through females, so this means at some point a European woman reproduced with an Indigenous man and the person (or people) who provided the sample(s) is descended from one of their offspring. The AJBA study being linked discusses Indigenous mtDNA in a European (specifically Icelandic) population. The introgression in the AJBA article is dated to between the 10th and 18th century, and it's not news that Europeans and Indigenous people had more than one kind of contact ;). The study being referenced by the meme is not the same! If you have questions I'd be happy to answer in pm.
It is European DNA that was found in people in North America.
The sentence is:
It's a mitochondrial DNA found only in Europe.
The subject of the sentence is "mitochondrial DNA" so when they say "found only in Europe" they're referring to the mitochondrial DNA.
If they meant that North American mitochondrial DNA was in Europe, they would not say "ONLY found in Europe" - they would say it was North American DNA found in Europe.
If the mitochondrial DNA is "only found in Europe" then it can't be coming from Native American women, otherwise it wouldn't be only in Europe.
The 2010 study revealing mtDNA haplogroup C1e in Icelanders found a genetic marker, usually Native American/East Asian, in some Icelandic families, suggesting a Native American woman was brought back to Iceland by Norse explorers around 1000 AD from North America (Vinland), establishing a distinct genetic link predating Columbus and showing early transatlantic contact
It seems it’s like 2-7% of Inuit only, so presumably the implication is that it originated in Europe. So “only” in Europe is incorrect, it should say “originally only found in Europe” or “mostly found in Europe”
No, I’m a biological anthropologist and when it’s said that a gene is “found only in x” like this it means that it originates in x and was found somewhere new. I don’t know what study this is talking about but I’m inclined to believe it’s relating to a common racist pseudoscientific belief that native Americans actually weren’t the first people in the US, it was in fact Scandinavians. This is a claim made by white supremacists seeking to undermine the indigenous people’s status as indigenous and justify their genocide while placing white Europeans as the “rightful” inhabitants of NA
Edit: since yall want to keep linking this, lemme break it down in advance: the meme refers to European mtDNA being discovered in an Indigenous American sample. mtDNA is only passed down through females, so this means at some point a European woman reproduced with an Indigenous man and the person (or people) who provided the sample(s) is descended from one of their offspring. The AJBA study being linked discusses Indigenous mtDNA in a European (specifically Icelandic) population. The introgression in the AJBA article is dated to between the 10th and 18th century, and it's not news that Europeans and Indigenous people had more than one kind of contact ;). The study being referenced by the meme is not the same! If you have questions I'd be happy to answer in pm.
Not a biological anthropologist, but unfortunately, I do have white supremacist family and grew up in a very white supremacist region of the country.
The short version is that there's a lot of pseudoscience out there designed to prove, essentially, that certain ethnicities "belong" in America, and deserve to be treated as "white", because they've been here a long time. The celebration of Columbus Day, for instance, has long been a proxy fight for "hey, we shouldn't discriminate against Italian-Americans, because Italians discovered America and therefore 'logically' deserve to be treated the same as WASPs". Norwegian and Swedish-American immigrants that predominantly arrived in 1880-1920 have some of the same arguments with the existing white Anglo-Saxon power structure they found when they arrived in America, and use historical figures like Leif Ericsson for the exact same purpose: we were actually here first, so please treat us like we're "white."
The joke here is that a white supremacist sees "European" DNA in native populations and rejoices, because it reconfirms his pseudoscientific belief that his particular subgroup has been here for long enough to count as "white". Then he sees that it's mitochondrial DNA, which means that a European woman came over and procreated with a Native American male. If a Viking came over and sexually assaulted a native woman, that would reinforce the power structures that underlie racists' worldview. Norse women coming over and having sex with a Native American man does not.
It’s always blown my mind a little that Columbus Day is simultaneously a way of pushing back against white supremacist xenophobia and an implicit celebration of indigenous genocide.
But I’d say given that Italian Americans have been fully assimilated into whiteness, they don’t need the holiday anymore.
I don't see how Columbus day is a way of pushing back against white supremacist xenophobia? A group making an argument to be included in the definition of white isn't pushing back against white supremacy, it is just asking to be a part of it.
I mean, Vikings brought back slaves but no child was born into slavery. The children of slaves became Vikings themselves. The effect is that Vikings were people genetically mixed with the people they raided. If someone is trying to make that fact to fit any kind of political agenda I find it dishonest
Interesting to hear about that pseudoscientific theory. As European totally unaware about this topic and the fuzz about it in the USA.
Question, how about the theory that native Americans are related and originated from Asians, who walked over the icy and frozen land from nowadays Russia into Alaska? That doesn't sound wild to me.
The going scientific consensus is that Native Americans came from Asia, though I understand people have raised timeline issues with the Bearing Strait crossing. I'm not informed enough to take a position there.
That humanity originated in Africa, and therefore Native Americans crossed the ocean from somewhere else, is pretty well settled. However, this would have been before any ethnic groups assumed their modern forms, so it doesn't give anyone from elsewhere some sort of legitimate "right" to America
It is referencing the approximately 3% of native Americans that came from Europe prior to Columbus.
Of course both arguments are racist and invalid. As ALL America, north and south, came from Across the Sea. America, if it had people before the last eruption of Yellowstone, lost it's "Native" population a looong time ago. So no human "race" could claim that status, but Asains would have the "most claim" if anyone could.
Also, living in the past is stupid. We should learn from it. Not live in it.
That's the current favored explanation. The study identified a unique subclade of haplogroup C (C1e) which bears strong resemblance to haplogroups present in Siberia and the Americas. This subclade exists only in Iceland. One possible explanation is that the Norse who visited Newfoundland returned with native women who introduced their DNA to the population. The other explanation is that the DNA came from the other direction, with Norse raids into northern Russia.
Per Wikipedia (so, grain of salt) the latter explanation is looking more likely with the discovery of the related but now extinct subclade C1f in northwestern Russia.
I think the mod logical explanation is that the men where killed and the woman kept as wife’s. As I recall it is common to take female hostages/sæaves/wifes. I mean it is what the Viking’s themselves did when raiding.
It's what most humans during those time periods did when cultures clashed militarily. The Romans, the Persians, the Gothic tribes, the Normans in England, the Europeans coming to the Americas, the English in India, the Chinese/Korean/Japanese back and forth...
I think you are right, I am not arguing that you are wrong. Which I mean to say, I think the meme was "shocked" that the native people killed the men and took the women.
But the logic of this is so siloed from any other possible explanation. It could just have been that the Vikings had a settlement, and after several generations, their people culturally melted into the nearby native tribes. No one had to be murdered for the matrilineal DNA to be found.
There’s also the widely accepted hypothesis that the “missing colony” of Roanoke just melted into the neighboring indigenous tribe on Croatoan Island which is why they carved “Croatoan” in the tree.
They’ve also found evidence of a forge being used by the indigenous on that island which wasn’t a technology that’s been found anywhere else in the region.
I agree this also could be more likely explanation. It wasn’t uncommon for Vikings to assimilate into the local cultures of the places they raided. Dublin, York, Normandy, Kyivan Rus, etc.
I love how they waited like, 20 years just for him to drop “You know what this reminds me of? My Icelandic boyhood” as a throwaway line then made it canon
Its because the sort of people that obsess over this sort of thing tend to be one of two people:
1: History buffs genuinely interested in how humanity has spread across the globe
2: White supremacists.
The first group is shocked because it implies the Vikings brought women on their voyages who then had children with the natives.
The second is shocked because it implies the Vikings brought women on their voyages who then had children with the natives (but read this one in a more racist way).
In Reykjavik, Iceland, there is a statue of Leif Erikson, commemorating him being the first European explorer to reach the New World. That statue was gifted to Iceland....by America! In the 1950's! Raise your hand if you went to American school as a kid, after the 1950's, and were still told that Columbus got here first? 🤚🏻
I could be wrong, but it’s been my understanding that Viking women could be warriors as well. Ancient warriors don’t have a great record with consent and the like.
Your understanding is wrong or at least unconfirmed. There is mention of female warriors in Norse sagas alongside dragons, giants, elves and other such creatures.
It is like people surmising Amazons really existed because they are mentioned in Greek mythology next to demigods, cyclopians, and centaurs.
To be fair, there was also a norse graveside that got some public attention because it contained the skeleton of a woman along with a sword, but swords had a symbolical, positive meaning and can also be found in the graves of children and infants as well. That is not an indication that 18 months old baby warriors occasionally went on the viking, it is a sign that a sword in a grave allows no conclusion about what the occupation of a person was in their lifetime - and this is pretty much true even for graves going back to the bronze age or even earlier. Wounds, injuries and bone changes left on the skeleton tend to allow a hypotheses sometimes if it can be discerned whether they stem from weapons or from work accidents or often repeated movements.
There is no indication that norse tribal society was radically different than any other raiding tribal society, and basically all those we have reliable research on leave raiding and war almost exclusively to men (not necessarily the decision process on when and why or where to go to war, a process which can involve women depending on what culture we talk about and what era (since cultures are not stagnant), but the practical execution of such decisions is basically universally left to male members of a society regardless of timeframe).
The most likely explanation would follow the accepted theory that the vikings were forced to abandon their North American colonies due to the Little Ice Age. While unsaid, it’s entirely possible (even likely) that there were still people at those colonies when they were abandoned. Cut off from their homeland, it’s plausible that they were taken in by native tribes and commingled.
I think its supposed to say that the mitochondrial DNA stems from women in europe and was previously to this only found in Europe (and thus must originate from European, Viking women)
Imagine hunting and gathering and smoking by the fire every night, then some big ass white women show up on a boat and wanna screw? It’s basically a romance novel
Remember that the type of person who obsesses over the "genetic heritage" of a mother and father also tends to not consider two different "genetic heritages" able to coexist peacefully.
I would say tho the Vikings did recount regular conflict with natives though. But it was really stupid incidents, like (paraphrasing)”We killed these people sleeping under a boat, so our settlement was razed out of vengeance”
I mean at that time in human history most women were traded by their fathers like livestock to secure alliances, whether within their community or outside of it. So there’s no real reason to think they’d be “enslaved and raped” more than or less than they would’ve been if traded to another Viking clan.
Norse women enjoyed a better relative societal position than their counterparts in, say, contemporary Christian societies. Women who would go on and complete a voyage to the new world would especially not be of the typical subservient type.
I think a lot of people are omitting/disregarding the fact that a lot of tribes often have complex systems of kinship networks, community recognition, and cultural responsibilities that define ancestry more than a mere genetic "blood quantum". Many even define ancestry through either matrilineal (descent through the mother) or patrilineal (descent through the father) clans/kinship systems. These systems were fundamental to community life and continuity.
For example, Navajo women are the only ones who can transmit Navajo clans to an offspring and/or create the conditions for the emergence of new ones through intermarriage and giving birth. In Navajo society, no degree of European, Pueblo, Spanish, African, etc. presence whether violent or consensual, ancient or recent, male or female; can convert biological ancestry into social legitimacy without a Navajo women’s recognized authority. Knowing one's four clans (mother's, father's, maternal grandfather's, and paternal grandfather's) establishes one's place in Navajo society. In the case of the Navajo tribe and band, ancestral legitimacy is social, not biological.
There are two completely different accounts of her deeds in North America: as villain and as heroine.
In one (the Greenlander Saga), she’s a villainous psycho. According to this, she partnered up with a pair of brothers to exploit Vinland, but quarreled with them. She convinces her husband and the men in her party to attack the bothers and his faction, by falsely accusing them of raping her; and she finishes off their women herself, with an axe. She tries to hide her murderous deeds but her brother finds out; though he doesn’t punish her, he’s disappointed.
In the other (Saga of Eric the Red) she’s a brave heroine. The Vikings in Vinland are attacked by native North Americans. The warriors panic and run - except for Freydis. She’s eight months pregnant (!) but yells at the men, saying “why run? I’ll fight them myself, just give me a sword!” And when she’s surrounded by enemies, she bares her breasts, slaps her tits with her sword, and scares them so much they run away. Everyone admires her bravery.
That might be the joke, but anybody who thinks that the bulk of Scandinavian immigrants came to the New World as Vikings is not someone you should be talking to
Brian here. So, whoever made this meme probably believes in something called the Solutrean Hypothesis and believes that the original Native American population was descended from a European population who crossed the Arctic Sea, instead of an Asiatic population who crossed Beringia. One piece of evidence that they cite is that the "X" mitochondrial haplogroup is more present in North America and Europe, but not Asia.
The X haplogroup appears to be ancestral to the Middle East, where it spread east and west. In fact, one of the populations with the largest prevalence of X are the Druze, and the Altai people of Siberia also carry X2 and X2a. Current evidence shows that the European (X2b, X2c, X2d, X2e, and X2f) and Native American (X2a and X2g) haplogroups are not ancestral to each other, but derived from a common ancestor when this group split. Also of note, the X haplogroup is not the dominant haplogroup of American Indians, and is less present that A, B, C, and D which have ancestral lineages established in Asia and make up about 95% of Native American mitochondrial DNA. Edit: though a note in the Solutrean Hypothesis's favor - the X haplogroup is only very prevalent in the Algonquin people around the Great Lakes in the Eastern US which is where the Solutrean Hypothesis proposes that Europeans crossed into North America.
While this was at one time treated like a real hypothesis (there are also some similarities in tools between the Solutrean and Clovis tool sets in Europe and North America, it was not just because of the DNA), the hypothesis has been thoroughly rejected by continued DNA work in the last couple of decades. Now, its primarily used by proponents of "lost high technology" and similar who believe that there was an ancient globe spanning civilization that was destroyed 11,000 years ago from a meteor causing the Younger Dryas cooling event. And also by straight up white supremacists, racists love the Solutrean Hypothesis almost as much as the pseudoarcheologists do.
Edit edit: actually they could instead be referring to this study on a novel C1 haplotype that arose in a small portion of Iceland and could have resulted from pe-Columbian contact across the Arctic Sea (like 1000 AD or later), which is a more widely supported idea. I don't get why this would be shocking considering other evidence of contact during this time frame and presumed descriptions of Native Americans in a saga.
https://norskk.is/bytta/standa/Icelanders_PreColumbianContact.pdf
First time hearing about it, but the argument sounds like it was trying to make the answer to a scientific quandary a binary choice when it would make more sense that both are in fact most likely true based on the evidence was known to exist.
The actual hypothesis has a lot more gray and presents that it was part of the peopling of the Americas. This nuance is lost in the pop-science version propagated online.
Though even this is rejected by modern DNA evidence. The split between the groups occurred prior to the evidence of either of the related tool types. The Clovis tool complex also does not feature similarities to the tool complex ancestral to the Solutrean. This suggests that regardless of shared ancestry, the tool types arose and converged on similar features independently thus the convergence does not serve as evidence for shared ancestry. That is probably the biggest dent to its supporting evidence. It also piggybacks on the Clovis-first hypothesis which is increasingly falling out of favor (some would say it has been rejected as well). Kennewick man also had a more ancestral X2a than has been found in Algonquin populations, suggesting from his location that X radiated out from the same source as the other mtDNA haplogroups
Alright, that definitely sounds more interesting then. I will have to do some digging I haven’t looked into the stuff in forever due to how political it became and how much question “evidence” was being taught but this makes me want to learn a bit more to broaden my understanding of what happened and how we have to come to our more recent conclusions.
Good information, but I think the text in the post is poorly written and it’s actually discussing the 2010 discovery of Native American DNA in about 80 Icelanders, implying that around 1000 AD a single Native American woman was brought to Iceland and had a children.
Yes, I was actually editing this in when your reply came through. I didnt get why that study woul elicit the reaction, but the idea that it came from a single female (or maybe a group of recent matrilineally related females) makes it make sense
Wouldn't a simpler explanation involve Scandinavian immigration to the New World, particularly given the two largest waves (New Sweden in the 17th century and the much larger immigration wave to the Upper Midwest in the mid to late 19th century) both put those immigrants in relatively close proximity to Native Americans?
Let me get that straight. The mitochondrial DNA is found (= originates according to you) in Europe, but also shared by Native Americans. How exactly does that imply that NA found Europe, rather than the other way round?
Because the by far easiest explanation for that would be 1+ Scandinavian women having kids in Native American communities and the DNA spreading through that. And seeing how we know that there were Nordic settlements Northern America, it seems likely that that's how the women got over there.
It's the opposite. Mitochondrial dna travels through the mother. So mtdna found only in Europe would mean it was indigenous men and European women. Which is the opposite of the belief of what happened when Viking men took native women to Iceland.
Because the explorers were men. In the actual cases, Viking men explored the Americas, took native women back, impregnated them, and so in Iceland there are people with indigenous mtdna. This is just flipping it.
The actual solution, in case anyone cares was found through ancient dna. A now extinct group called the ANE (ancient North eurasians) was found to have contributed to both europeans and the east asian groups settling the Americas. But this ancestry is not found in east Asia (native Americans are roughly a combination of northern east Asians +ANE derived people.
Before this was known this was a big mystery, and I guess the meme is playing on some other explanations.
What it's talking about is how the Vinlanders who got left behind did the same thing as what happened in Jonestown and the Croatoans. The left the colony and joined the Skraelings. This mdna is from Vinlander women having children with Skraeling men.
There is no good genetic evidence for this. X2 is foumd widespread in 13 % of native North Americans. Including Kennewick man, who at 9000 years old, predates the events at Vinland. Ancient dna studies have found that basal X lineages once existed in Siberia, although it's no longer present there. It's found in about 2% of Europeans. The scenario you describe may have happened, but it's very unlikely we can find evidence with the small number of people and decimation of native American populations that followed.
Peter it’s Brian here, but like S1 Brian where I’m actually smart and not just every shitty thing a liberal could be.
Well, calling these people Vikings is kind of a misnomer, the culture would have been Norse, or Danish, Viking is a job, this would be like an American woman moving to France and having a kid and saying “NAVY SEAL DNA FOUND IN FRANCE!” Many Norse people were not Vikings but farmers, settlers, merchants, and craftspeople so this is probably evidence of Norse women settling in the Americas and having children with First Nations men. I think the meme is implying a non consensual relationship but there’s no reason to assume that and if the people who inhabited the failed Norse settlements, just like those who inhabited the failed Roanoke settlement, integrated with their indigenous neighbors, then intermarriage and romantic and sexual relationships would be the expectation, not a surprise.
Native American men came to Europe and then went back, Native American come from Europe or Women came with Leif Erikson to America and consensually or non-consensually hooked up with natives.
After Leif Erikson established Vinland in Newfoundland there were a rise in Native stories about a tall, red haired, light skin tribe. And for survival most likely did intermingled.
I think people are making it a little deeper going into DNA analysis and such.
One typically would think of Vikings as a big group of men raping and pillaging their way across the land to bring home their plunder. If a mitochondrial DNA from Europe is present, that means that there were Viking women out there, procreating as well. These children lived and bred and so presumably settled in the New World. This shatters the illusion most people have of what a Viking conquest might look like.
Im no Norse scholar, so take what i say for a grain of salt
You are correct, Vinland was a farming/trading settlement, not a raider base. Full families lived there. The Sagas talk about their wives, one of whom became the de facto leader of the settlement. Their contact with the Skraelings were mostly peaceful. At first, the only point of contention was that Vinlanders would not trade away or teach them how to make iron tools and weapons.
The fallout happened when three Skraelings were mistaken for boat thieves by a scouting expedition near the mouth of the St. Lawrence and were executed by the Vinlanders. One of them was either a friend or relation to the local Skraeling chief. The 'upper classmen' fled back to Greenland after the reprisals started. The Greenland Sagas end there.
From this, we can infer that, at a minimum, some Vinland women and children were taken by the Skraelings and either kept as slaves or integrated into the tribe. They bred with the Skraelings and their children or children's children became full tribe members.
If they intermarried you’d expect non-mitochondrial DNA to make it down stream, but honestly this is meme with no source listed so the original intent of the meme is probably just some racist asshat or blackpiller malding that European women are having children outside their race
Yeah, a Croatoa-like event is far more likely. If not all the Vinlanders made it back to Greenland and they would have moved to live with the Skraelings after their connection east was cut off.
I wonder if any Athabaskans claimed their ancestors could speak with stones, like the blue-eyes Croatoans claimed their ancestors could speak with books.
They're making fun of conspiracy theories about African descendants being the "true" Hebrews and Native Americans. Basically, Africans discovered the Americas, wrote the Bible, and built the pyramids, and the descendants of the people who actually did those things are racist imposters.
Mitochondrial DNA is passed through the mother so the implication is that they wiped out some American tribe/s, then kidnapped the females and brought them back to procreate with them.
It implies that European women had children with native men, who then stayed in the americas. Which is plausible given that we know there were Norse settlements in North America.
Im not sure where youre getting the "wiped out" part, or really anything else you said, you are a deeply confused person. Wer'e saying that European maternal DNA was in the americas not the other way around
Viking men did their Viking thing and ran off with native women-hence why only mitochondrial dna was found in Europe as it’s passed from mother to daughter in an unbroken chain.
I know it seems rose-tinted, but why is no one just suggesting that maybe some settlers just... fell in love? Met a tribe, had good relations, and intermarried because they didn't have conceptualization of "races" as we do??
Or just like Roanoke, some Vinland colony collapsed and the locals joined native tribes to survive because they lacked the knowledge to survive alone.
So, while Vikings/Norse people absolutely did the raping and pillaging thing often, that wasn't all they did. They also had farmers, craftsmen and traders. They are documented as being very open to trade with other races. They also had pretty progressive rights for women, so it could be that the women could have intermarried. While that is nice, Vikings also took part in the slave trade, which could be another explanation. Since there isn't much information about why Viking society did not flourish as noticeably, it could be any of these explanations. Alternatively, the Viking colonists could have been wiped out and the women taken, as others have implied.
TL;DR: Vikings are a bit more complex than their reputation would lead you to believe. We don't know much about Viking colonies in North America, so any combination of these explanations could be true.
The post is badly worded. The mdna is native to Europe and was not found in America until after 1006. Children of Vinlandr women and Skraeling men stayed behind after the colony was abandoned.
So this mitochondrial DNA that they found in pre-colonial native Americans is only found in Europe? Funny, because I'm pretty sure it was also found in America...
the shock is usually when there's white dna in indenginous lines people think rape. but a european women and indigenous man theres more of an idea of a loving relationship
The memer is surprised because it overturns the narrative that white people were predatory and native Americans were innocent. Mitochondrial dna comes from a Viking woman, so that means the dna mixing didn’t come exclusively from whites raping natives.
This is not an earth shattering revelation: All it means is that there were Norse women on the expedition that ended up in what is now commonly called Canada and some of them slept around. This is consistent with every other large scale Norse expedition.
Wait til you find out about the strangeness of Rhesus Hormone present or not in blood. It’s like there was an earth human mixed with something otherworldly at some point.
People like to look surface and say it’s just a mutation but that doesn’t make sense with natural selection or how ancient it is.
The meme suggests that 1.the Vikings abducted Native American women and brought them back to Europe and/or 2. Indigenous people killed off any/all mixed-race children birthed by Norse settlers and/or 3. The Norse were so strict in their control over their own women not a single one was able to birth the child of an Indigenous father and/or 4. The Norse women were so racist not a single one slept with an Indigenous man.
In reality the scale and duration of Early Medieval Norse attempts to settle North America were so miniscule that lopsided data like this isn't surprising.
The post is badly worded. The mdna is native to Europe and was not found in America until after 1006. Children of Vinlandr women and Skraeling men stayed behind after the colony was abandoned.
I thought everyone knew this. Vikings found North America long ago but didnt stay long, they clashed with natives a few times from what I understand and lost, there must have been some kind of peace at one point because of the shared DNA. They fucked. Maybe rape, but idk how likely it is that natives would have raped a Nordic POW and kept her alive to carry the child and then allow the child to live among the tribe. So my guess is some chose to stay and earned the trust of the tribe. I love history
This is really super simple. They were super into the idea of viking men raping in North America, but not as into viking women starting relationships with natives.
Subtext meaning that might be missed: anyone on reddit using words like "mitochondrial" in memes are Joe Rogan fans and antivaxxers. Probably. Good chance of it. Also, deep seated racist beliefs. Like the kind of person who would be upset to find out that white women from Europe chose to "breed" with "brown people" or "savages" over other white men who presumably came to the New World with them.
Genuinely, I think a fair few Puritan women (remember that the English have a fair amount of Viking ancestry) who were "kidnapped" actually fucked off into the woods because being a woman in Puritan New England was absolutely hellish.
"Oh so there is a community a day's walk away that doesn't think midwifery is witchcraft? So I might actually survive childbirth??? Peace fools."
I have to think that the creator thought that that shared DNA was a spontaneous coincidence in evolution, and was surprised that its actually a result of interbreeding and that vikings made it to america at some point. or maybe theyre saying vikings got cucked in america, idk
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If your post isn’t a joke or doesn't need an explanation, it will be removed. Likewise, poor quality posts or comments will be removed. Rule 6.
Mitochondrial dna is only passed down matrilineally, meaning that Viking women procreated with Native American men and that those children grew up in and spent their lives in the New World.
As to why the meme uses the shocked/horrified expression for this information I have no idea. Maybe they think that the indigenous men kept the Viking women as sex slaves or that they’re realizing that this implies permanent Viking colonies in the New World which undermines a lot of how North American history is conventionally understood by the layperson.
Also this is like… idk Carl Carlson from the Simpsons. He’s ethnically Norwegian for some reason, right?
I get it that it's the native American women were moved to Europe, since it's found there
upd: this is the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47743881_A_New_Subclade_of_mtDNA_Haplogroup_C1_Found_in_Icelanders_Evidence_of_Pre-Columbian_Contact
I think your explanation makes more sense given the context of the meme, it didn’t occur to me that “found in” meant literally that the people those DNA sequences were located in Europe. I took it as a more colloquial meaning, “these DNA sequences are found in Europe” meaning that they’re native to Europe.
“Found only in Europe”
Some of the native groups which inhabited the regions of North America which Vikings visited don't exist anymore. They died out in-between the Viking trips to North America and the later discovery of the New World. For example indigenous Greenlanders are a different group of people who migrated into the region after the collapse of the medieval Norse colony there.
Wasnt there a big war? Youre talking about the inuit right? And how can they be indigenous if they migrated?
In Greenland? I don't think so.
You want the real answer? Because indigenous is a stupidly imprecise word to describe native people which glosses over which native group took which land or migrated to their land however recently and it essentially boils down to just meaning non-western/didn't cross the ocean on boats to get here.
Lol you said the last part beautifully.
Looks like there wasnt a big war but possible some scattered skirmishes mentioned in the vinland sagas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland_sagas
To be fair, a couple scattered skirmishes to you could be a world war to some tribes. It’s all relative.
Fools_errand49 is right. Just to give a glance at the various cultures discovered there from the Wikipedia page:
"The earliest known cultures in Greenland are the Saqqaq culture (2500–800 BCE)[2] and the Independence I culture in northern Greenland (2400–1300 BCE). The practitioners of these two cultures are thought to have descended from separate groups that came to Greenland from North America, nearby Nunavut.[3] Around 800 BCE, the so-called Independence II culture arose in the region where the Independence I culture had previously existed.[4] It was originally thought that Independence II was succeeded by the early Dorset culture (700 BCE–CE 1), but some Independence II artefacts date from as recently as the 1st century BCE. Recent studies suggest that, in Greenland at least, the Dorset culture may be better understood as a continuation of Independence II culture; the two cultures have therefore been designated "Greenlandic Dorset".[5] Artefacts associated with early Dorset culture in Greenland have been found as far north as Inglefield Land on the west coast and the Dove Bay area on the east coast.[6] After the Early Dorset culture disappeared by around CE 1, Greenland was apparently uninhabited until Late Dorset people settled on the Greenlandic side of the Nares Strait around 700 CE.[5] The late Dorset culture in the north of Greenland lasted until about 1300.[7] Meanwhile, the Norse arrived and settled in the southern part of the island in 980."
Humans move all the time. How many generations does it take for you to be considered native? The answer to that question entirely depends on who you talk to and the context. Me for example have ancestry spanning Europe but my family has been America for several generations so I ask am I native to this land or an outsider
Sure, but it also says that this DNA is found in Native American groups, so logically it must be found in North America as well. It seems the post is grammatically flawed, which is why people are having trouble interpreting it.
Not sure it says that
"Most surprisingly, we demonstrate that the Icelandic C1 lineage does not belong to any of the four known Native American (C1b, C1c, and C1d) or Asian (C1a) subclades of haplogroup C1. Rather, it is presently the only known member of a new subclade, C1e. While a Native American origin seems most likely for C1e, an Asian or European origin cannot be ruled out."
That may be what the article says, but the post isn’t necessarily correctly interpreting the article. I’m only referring to what is in the post itself. I am not familiar with the article, and cannot address it.
Doesn't that make it semantically flawed rather than grammatically?
No I think logically it must mean that this DNA is only found in people with Native American genetics who are born in Europe, because the interpretation that it’s just grammatically incorrect would also mean it doesn’t make any point of note, why would it be meaningful to point out that this DNA is found in everyone of that group regardless of geography? Wouldn’t that just be the first panel? If that’s the case then why is the guy in the second panel expressing shock??
"For instance, a recent paper provided evidence of the presence of Amerindian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) within a family line in Iceland. It appears that at least one of the early Norse travelers to North America brought a wife back to Iceland (Ebenesersdóttir et al., 2011). ...".
This is the hypothesis they believe to be most likely.
I still don’t understand which one is it, would it be “has been found only in Europe” or “is only found in Europe”?
Mitochondrial DNA is passed only from mother to children (male and female children, but only female children will pass it on) so the mitochondrial DNA allegedly found in this case is seen in European’s DNA (it is not “found only in Europe” but it did originate in Europe)
u/ialsoagree is right. The dna in question originated in Europe and was newly found in NA. I don’t know of any such study so I don’t believe it’s real, this would be all over the news. probably just a racist pseudoscientists fantasy about white people being the natural and rightful inhabitants of NA.
Edit: since yall want to keep linking this, lemme break it down in advance: the meme refers to European mtDNA being discovered in an Indigenous American sample. mtDNA is only passed down through females, so this means at some point a European woman reproduced with an Indigenous man and the person (or people) who provided the sample(s) is descended from one of their offspring. The AJBA study being linked discusses Indigenous mtDNA in a European (specifically Icelandic) population. The introgression in the AJBA article is dated to between the 10th and 18th century, and it's not news that Europeans and Indigenous people had more than one kind of contact ;). The study being referenced by the meme is not the same! If you have questions I'd be happy to answer in pm.
This is the study A New Subclade of mtDNA Haplogroup C1 Found in Icelanders: Evidence of Pre-Columbian Contact? | Request PDF
It is European DNA that was found in people in North America.
The sentence is:
It's a mitochondrial DNA found only in Europe.
The subject of the sentence is "mitochondrial DNA" so when they say "found only in Europe" they're referring to the mitochondrial DNA.
If they meant that North American mitochondrial DNA was in Europe, they would not say "ONLY found in Europe" - they would say it was North American DNA found in Europe.
If the mitochondrial DNA is "only found in Europe" then it can't be coming from Native American women, otherwise it wouldn't be only in Europe.
It's vice versa.
The 2010 study revealing mtDNA haplogroup C1e in Icelanders found a genetic marker, usually Native American/East Asian, in some Icelandic families, suggesting a Native American woman was brought back to Iceland by Norse explorers around 1000 AD from North America (Vinland), establishing a distinct genetic link predating Columbus and showing early transatlantic contact
this.
It seems it’s like 2-7% of Inuit only, so presumably the implication is that it originated in Europe. So “only” in Europe is incorrect, it should say “originally only found in Europe” or “mostly found in Europe”
Or “previously only found in Europe”
If it was found in America then that second statement is untrue lol
Current theory is a land bridge connecting alaska to Eurasia.
Then the Eurasian nomads come to north america and spread down from AK.
Or more recently, the migration was by sea before the land bridge was passable.
It’s only found in Europe, so the transit war TO America, others it would be common in America, not otherwise absent.
No, I’m a biological anthropologist and when it’s said that a gene is “found only in x” like this it means that it originates in x and was found somewhere new. I don’t know what study this is talking about but I’m inclined to believe it’s relating to a common racist pseudoscientific belief that native Americans actually weren’t the first people in the US, it was in fact Scandinavians. This is a claim made by white supremacists seeking to undermine the indigenous people’s status as indigenous and justify their genocide while placing white Europeans as the “rightful” inhabitants of NA
Edit: since yall want to keep linking this, lemme break it down in advance: the meme refers to European mtDNA being discovered in an Indigenous American sample. mtDNA is only passed down through females, so this means at some point a European woman reproduced with an Indigenous man and the person (or people) who provided the sample(s) is descended from one of their offspring. The AJBA study being linked discusses Indigenous mtDNA in a European (specifically Icelandic) population. The introgression in the AJBA article is dated to between the 10th and 18th century, and it's not news that Europeans and Indigenous people had more than one kind of contact ;). The study being referenced by the meme is not the same! If you have questions I'd be happy to answer in pm.
Not a biological anthropologist, but unfortunately, I do have white supremacist family and grew up in a very white supremacist region of the country.
The short version is that there's a lot of pseudoscience out there designed to prove, essentially, that certain ethnicities "belong" in America, and deserve to be treated as "white", because they've been here a long time. The celebration of Columbus Day, for instance, has long been a proxy fight for "hey, we shouldn't discriminate against Italian-Americans, because Italians discovered America and therefore 'logically' deserve to be treated the same as WASPs". Norwegian and Swedish-American immigrants that predominantly arrived in 1880-1920 have some of the same arguments with the existing white Anglo-Saxon power structure they found when they arrived in America, and use historical figures like Leif Ericsson for the exact same purpose: we were actually here first, so please treat us like we're "white."
The joke here is that a white supremacist sees "European" DNA in native populations and rejoices, because it reconfirms his pseudoscientific belief that his particular subgroup has been here for long enough to count as "white". Then he sees that it's mitochondrial DNA, which means that a European woman came over and procreated with a Native American male. If a Viking came over and sexually assaulted a native woman, that would reinforce the power structures that underlie racists' worldview. Norse women coming over and having sex with a Native American man does not.
Wow perfect breakdown, you did what I could not
It’s always blown my mind a little that Columbus Day is simultaneously a way of pushing back against white supremacist xenophobia and an implicit celebration of indigenous genocide.
But I’d say given that Italian Americans have been fully assimilated into whiteness, they don’t need the holiday anymore.
I don't see how Columbus day is a way of pushing back against white supremacist xenophobia? A group making an argument to be included in the definition of white isn't pushing back against white supremacy, it is just asking to be a part of it.
I mean, Vikings brought back slaves but no child was born into slavery. The children of slaves became Vikings themselves. The effect is that Vikings were people genetically mixed with the people they raided. If someone is trying to make that fact to fit any kind of political agenda I find it dishonest
Interesting to hear about that pseudoscientific theory. As European totally unaware about this topic and the fuzz about it in the USA.
Question, how about the theory that native Americans are related and originated from Asians, who walked over the icy and frozen land from nowadays Russia into Alaska? That doesn't sound wild to me.
The going scientific consensus is that Native Americans came from Asia, though I understand people have raised timeline issues with the Bearing Strait crossing. I'm not informed enough to take a position there.
That humanity originated in Africa, and therefore Native Americans crossed the ocean from somewhere else, is pretty well settled. However, this would have been before any ethnic groups assumed their modern forms, so it doesn't give anyone from elsewhere some sort of legitimate "right" to America
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9837837/
It is referencing the approximately 3% of native Americans that came from Europe prior to Columbus. Of course both arguments are racist and invalid. As ALL America, north and south, came from Across the Sea. America, if it had people before the last eruption of Yellowstone, lost it's "Native" population a looong time ago. So no human "race" could claim that status, but Asains would have the "most claim" if anyone could.
Also, living in the past is stupid. We should learn from it. Not live in it.
That's the current favored explanation. The study identified a unique subclade of haplogroup C (C1e) which bears strong resemblance to haplogroups present in Siberia and the Americas. This subclade exists only in Iceland. One possible explanation is that the Norse who visited Newfoundland returned with native women who introduced their DNA to the population. The other explanation is that the DNA came from the other direction, with Norse raids into northern Russia.
Per Wikipedia (so, grain of salt) the latter explanation is looking more likely with the discovery of the related but now extinct subclade C1f in northwestern Russia.
Well, vikings are known for doing exactly that, so it tracks.
That literally makes no sense seeing as how its mitochondrial dna that’s found only in Europe. That would be the exact opposite of what you said
I think the mod logical explanation is that the men where killed and the woman kept as wife’s. As I recall it is common to take female hostages/sæaves/wifes. I mean it is what the Viking’s themselves did when raiding.
It's what most humans during those time periods did when cultures clashed militarily. The Romans, the Persians, the Gothic tribes, the Normans in England, the Europeans coming to the Americas, the English in India, the Chinese/Korean/Japanese back and forth...
Not to mention the native Americans themselves. It's pretty much universal.
Shut up, Meg.
The Roman's were just a bunch of merchant dudes before they kidnapped a bunch of neighboring women to be their wives.
Hell Russia is doing it right now, though they are more interested in the children it seems.
Gotta replace the numbers they're bleeding, and children will be ready faster than babies.
The closest thing to modern day janissaries, humans can be so fucked.
I think you are right, I am not arguing that you are wrong. Which I mean to say, I think the meme was "shocked" that the native people killed the men and took the women.
But the logic of this is so siloed from any other possible explanation. It could just have been that the Vikings had a settlement, and after several generations, their people culturally melted into the nearby native tribes. No one had to be murdered for the matrilineal DNA to be found.
There’s also the widely accepted hypothesis that the “missing colony” of Roanoke just melted into the neighboring indigenous tribe on Croatoan Island which is why they carved “Croatoan” in the tree.
They’ve also found evidence of a forge being used by the indigenous on that island which wasn’t a technology that’s been found anywhere else in the region.
I agree this also could be more likely explanation. It wasn’t uncommon for Vikings to assimilate into the local cultures of the places they raided. Dublin, York, Normandy, Kyivan Rus, etc.
Congratulations! With "sæaves", your comment is the only lone result when Googling it, which is really really hard to do these days.
Icelandic
Carl is adopted
Carl from the Simpsons is canonically the adopted child of an Icelandic family
I love how they waited like, 20 years just for him to drop “You know what this reminds me of? My Icelandic boyhood” as a throwaway line then made it canon
Its because the sort of people that obsess over this sort of thing tend to be one of two people:
1: History buffs genuinely interested in how humanity has spread across the globe
2: White supremacists.
The first group is shocked because it implies the Vikings brought women on their voyages who then had children with the natives.
The second is shocked because it implies the Vikings brought women on their voyages who then had children with the natives (but read this one in a more racist way).
carl is culturally icelandic, he was adopted and raised in iceland, ethnically he is still black of unknown regional origin.
But we do know his birth father was a rodeo star, and that he came from a long line of black cowboys.
Carl contains multitudes.
In Reykjavik, Iceland, there is a statue of Leif Erikson, commemorating him being the first European explorer to reach the New World. That statue was gifted to Iceland....by America! In the 1950's! Raise your hand if you went to American school as a kid, after the 1950's, and were still told that Columbus got here first? 🤚🏻
Canadian, but I learned about Leif Erikson in school in the late 90s - early 2000s.
It probably clash with the ideas of Viking pillaging and raping women’s in north America
I could be wrong, but it’s been my understanding that Viking women could be warriors as well. Ancient warriors don’t have a great record with consent and the like.
Your understanding is wrong or at least unconfirmed. There is mention of female warriors in Norse sagas alongside dragons, giants, elves and other such creatures.
It is like people surmising Amazons really existed because they are mentioned in Greek mythology next to demigods, cyclopians, and centaurs.
To be fair, there was also a norse graveside that got some public attention because it contained the skeleton of a woman along with a sword, but swords had a symbolical, positive meaning and can also be found in the graves of children and infants as well. That is not an indication that 18 months old baby warriors occasionally went on the viking, it is a sign that a sword in a grave allows no conclusion about what the occupation of a person was in their lifetime - and this is pretty much true even for graves going back to the bronze age or even earlier. Wounds, injuries and bone changes left on the skeleton tend to allow a hypotheses sometimes if it can be discerned whether they stem from weapons or from work accidents or often repeated movements.
There is no indication that norse tribal society was radically different than any other raiding tribal society, and basically all those we have reliable research on leave raiding and war almost exclusively to men (not necessarily the decision process on when and why or where to go to war, a process which can involve women depending on what culture we talk about and what era (since cultures are not stagnant), but the practical execution of such decisions is basically universally left to male members of a society regardless of timeframe).
He was adopted by his Icelandic parents.See Season 24, episode 21.
They kidnapped indigenous people.
L'Anse aux Meadows colony was a viking colony in Newfoundland
I think most people in north america have ditched the columbus narrative and know that the vikings did it first. There is concrete evidence.
The most likely explanation would follow the accepted theory that the vikings were forced to abandon their North American colonies due to the Little Ice Age. While unsaid, it’s entirely possible (even likely) that there were still people at those colonies when they were abandoned. Cut off from their homeland, it’s plausible that they were taken in by native tribes and commingled.
Never knew he was Norwegian. Had to look it up and it said Iceland. Must be an episode I missed, fun fact.
If found only in Europe, then these Viking women are enslaving the Native American men and taking them to Europe?
I think its supposed to say that the mitochondrial DNA stems from women in europe and was previously to this only found in Europe (and thus must originate from European, Viking women)
I would guess the joke is female Vikings conquering Native American men, as mitochondrial DNA is maternal.
Death by SnuSnu
Yo you look like me
that's racist
The cooler Daniel.
Imagine hunting and gathering and smoking by the fire every night, then some big ass white women show up on a boat and wanna screw? It’s basically a romance novel
Except she beats you to near death and then rapes you before slicing your throat.
Hot
https://preview.redd.it/bujq1vbiz07g1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1900397f6f6017e356b3d851fb582935745cf791
The spirit is willing but the flesh is spongy and bruised
Or a group of viking men and women landed in America and the natives killed the men and had the women integrate into their society.
they didn't even need to kill the men, just interbreed with the women. there's no reason the two societies couldn't have mixed cooperatively
Remember that the type of person who obsesses over the "genetic heritage" of a mother and father also tends to not consider two different "genetic heritages" able to coexist peacefully.
I would say tho the Vikings did recount regular conflict with natives though. But it was really stupid incidents, like (paraphrasing)”We killed these people sleeping under a boat, so our settlement was razed out of vengeance”
Roanoke is calling.
Its so funny to me that it was such a big mystery and the answer was "Went to the neighbors for food and just stayed".
[deleted]
I mean at that time in human history most women were traded by their fathers like livestock to secure alliances, whether within their community or outside of it. So there’s no real reason to think they’d be “enslaved and raped” more than or less than they would’ve been if traded to another Viking clan.
Norse women enjoyed a better relative societal position than their counterparts in, say, contemporary Christian societies. Women who would go on and complete a voyage to the new world would especially not be of the typical subservient type.
I think a lot of people are omitting/disregarding the fact that a lot of tribes often have complex systems of kinship networks, community recognition, and cultural responsibilities that define ancestry more than a mere genetic "blood quantum". Many even define ancestry through either matrilineal (descent through the mother) or patrilineal (descent through the father) clans/kinship systems. These systems were fundamental to community life and continuity.
For example, Navajo women are the only ones who can transmit Navajo clans to an offspring and/or create the conditions for the emergence of new ones through intermarriage and giving birth. In Navajo society, no degree of European, Pueblo, Spanish, African, etc. presence whether violent or consensual, ancient or recent, male or female; can convert biological ancestry into social legitimacy without a Navajo women’s recognized authority. Knowing one's four clans (mother's, father's, maternal grandfather's, and paternal grandfather's) establishes one's place in Navajo society. In the case of the Navajo tribe and band, ancestral legitimacy is social, not biological.
Ironically enough, one of the Vikings we know by name prominently involved in the settlement in North America was a female Viking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freydís_Eiríksdóttir
There are two completely different accounts of her deeds in North America: as villain and as heroine.
In one (the Greenlander Saga), she’s a villainous psycho. According to this, she partnered up with a pair of brothers to exploit Vinland, but quarreled with them. She convinces her husband and the men in her party to attack the bothers and his faction, by falsely accusing them of raping her; and she finishes off their women herself, with an axe. She tries to hide her murderous deeds but her brother finds out; though he doesn’t punish her, he’s disappointed.
In the other (Saga of Eric the Red) she’s a brave heroine. The Vikings in Vinland are attacked by native North Americans. The warriors panic and run - except for Freydis. She’s eight months pregnant (!) but yells at the men, saying “why run? I’ll fight them myself, just give me a sword!” And when she’s surrounded by enemies, she bares her breasts, slaps her tits with her sword, and scares them so much they run away. Everyone admires her bravery.
Yes, I know of Norweigan women like this
That last image is such a good one, I'm surprised that I haven't seen it portrayed on TV.
Other way around? Native American men capturing Viking women then mating with them back in the New World.
That might be the joke, but anybody who thinks that the bulk of Scandinavian immigrants came to the New World as Vikings is not someone you should be talking to
Brian here. So, whoever made this meme probably believes in something called the Solutrean Hypothesis and believes that the original Native American population was descended from a European population who crossed the Arctic Sea, instead of an Asiatic population who crossed Beringia. One piece of evidence that they cite is that the "X" mitochondrial haplogroup is more present in North America and Europe, but not Asia.
The X haplogroup appears to be ancestral to the Middle East, where it spread east and west. In fact, one of the populations with the largest prevalence of X are the Druze, and the Altai people of Siberia also carry X2 and X2a. Current evidence shows that the European (X2b, X2c, X2d, X2e, and X2f) and Native American (X2a and X2g) haplogroups are not ancestral to each other, but derived from a common ancestor when this group split. Also of note, the X haplogroup is not the dominant haplogroup of American Indians, and is less present that A, B, C, and D which have ancestral lineages established in Asia and make up about 95% of Native American mitochondrial DNA. Edit: though a note in the Solutrean Hypothesis's favor - the X haplogroup is only very prevalent in the Algonquin people around the Great Lakes in the Eastern US which is where the Solutrean Hypothesis proposes that Europeans crossed into North America.
While this was at one time treated like a real hypothesis (there are also some similarities in tools between the Solutrean and Clovis tool sets in Europe and North America, it was not just because of the DNA), the hypothesis has been thoroughly rejected by continued DNA work in the last couple of decades. Now, its primarily used by proponents of "lost high technology" and similar who believe that there was an ancient globe spanning civilization that was destroyed 11,000 years ago from a meteor causing the Younger Dryas cooling event. And also by straight up white supremacists, racists love the Solutrean Hypothesis almost as much as the pseudoarcheologists do.
Edit edit: actually they could instead be referring to this study on a novel C1 haplotype that arose in a small portion of Iceland and could have resulted from pe-Columbian contact across the Arctic Sea (like 1000 AD or later), which is a more widely supported idea. I don't get why this would be shocking considering other evidence of contact during this time frame and presumed descriptions of Native Americans in a saga. https://norskk.is/bytta/standa/Icelanders_PreColumbianContact.pdf
First time hearing about it, but the argument sounds like it was trying to make the answer to a scientific quandary a binary choice when it would make more sense that both are in fact most likely true based on the evidence was known to exist.
The actual hypothesis has a lot more gray and presents that it was part of the peopling of the Americas. This nuance is lost in the pop-science version propagated online.
Though even this is rejected by modern DNA evidence. The split between the groups occurred prior to the evidence of either of the related tool types. The Clovis tool complex also does not feature similarities to the tool complex ancestral to the Solutrean. This suggests that regardless of shared ancestry, the tool types arose and converged on similar features independently thus the convergence does not serve as evidence for shared ancestry. That is probably the biggest dent to its supporting evidence. It also piggybacks on the Clovis-first hypothesis which is increasingly falling out of favor (some would say it has been rejected as well). Kennewick man also had a more ancestral X2a than has been found in Algonquin populations, suggesting from his location that X radiated out from the same source as the other mtDNA haplogroups
Alright, that definitely sounds more interesting then. I will have to do some digging I haven’t looked into the stuff in forever due to how political it became and how much question “evidence” was being taught but this makes me want to learn a bit more to broaden my understanding of what happened and how we have to come to our more recent conclusions.
Wow so it really burns up white supremacists to know that they came from brown people huh
Great explanation, thank you!
Graham Hancock being on the History Channel / Joe Rogan has got to be one of the least superior things I’ve ever seen.
Good information, but I think the text in the post is poorly written and it’s actually discussing the 2010 discovery of Native American DNA in about 80 Icelanders, implying that around 1000 AD a single Native American woman was brought to Iceland and had a children.
Yes, I was actually editing this in when your reply came through. I didnt get why that study woul elicit the reaction, but the idea that it came from a single female (or maybe a group of recent matrilineally related females) makes it make sense
This should be pinned at the top.
“One Piece of evidence…” then doesn’t say anything about the One Piece 🤦
Wouldn't a simpler explanation involve Scandinavian immigration to the New World, particularly given the two largest waves (New Sweden in the 17th century and the much larger immigration wave to the Upper Midwest in the mid to late 19th century) both put those immigrants in relatively close proximity to Native Americans?
Happy Leif Erikson Day!
Hing-a-ding a dergen!
It implies native Americans discovered Europe and not the other way around.
You mean the meme? Cause the DNA thing sure doesn't
Edit: typo
Yes. And how so. It's exactly what it means. It subverts the evidence we have of the opposite happening.
Then the DNA would also be found in America, would it not?
Found means originating. Not existing in.
Let me get that straight. The mitochondrial DNA is found (= originates according to you) in Europe, but also shared by Native Americans. How exactly does that imply that NA found Europe, rather than the other way round?
Because the by far easiest explanation for that would be 1+ Scandinavian women having kids in Native American communities and the DNA spreading through that. And seeing how we know that there were Nordic settlements Northern America, it seems likely that that's how the women got over there.
I think it’s implying that Vikings took Native American women back to Europe with them, probably not voluntarily.
It's the opposite. Mitochondrial dna travels through the mother. So mtdna found only in Europe would mean it was indigenous men and European women. Which is the opposite of the belief of what happened when Viking men took native women to Iceland.
So how would that imply that Native Americans discovered Europe??
Because the explorers were men. In the actual cases, Viking men explored the Americas, took native women back, impregnated them, and so in Iceland there are people with indigenous mtdna. This is just flipping it.
It does not. The Vinland colony included whole families. A woman was the de facto leader of the colony for some time.
The actual solution, in case anyone cares was found through ancient dna. A now extinct group called the ANE (ancient North eurasians) was found to have contributed to both europeans and the east asian groups settling the Americas. But this ancestry is not found in east Asia (native Americans are roughly a combination of northern east Asians +ANE derived people.
Before this was known this was a big mystery, and I guess the meme is playing on some other explanations.
What it's talking about is how the Vinlanders who got left behind did the same thing as what happened in Jonestown and the Croatoans. The left the colony and joined the Skraelings. This mdna is from Vinlander women having children with Skraeling men.
There is no good genetic evidence for this. X2 is foumd widespread in 13 % of native North Americans. Including Kennewick man, who at 9000 years old, predates the events at Vinland. Ancient dna studies have found that basal X lineages once existed in Siberia, although it's no longer present there. It's found in about 2% of Europeans. The scenario you describe may have happened, but it's very unlikely we can find evidence with the small number of people and decimation of native American populations that followed.
Peter it’s Brian here, but like S1 Brian where I’m actually smart and not just every shitty thing a liberal could be.
Well, calling these people Vikings is kind of a misnomer, the culture would have been Norse, or Danish, Viking is a job, this would be like an American woman moving to France and having a kid and saying “NAVY SEAL DNA FOUND IN FRANCE!” Many Norse people were not Vikings but farmers, settlers, merchants, and craftspeople so this is probably evidence of Norse women settling in the Americas and having children with First Nations men. I think the meme is implying a non consensual relationship but there’s no reason to assume that and if the people who inhabited the failed Norse settlements, just like those who inhabited the failed Roanoke settlement, integrated with their indigenous neighbors, then intermarriage and romantic and sexual relationships would be the expectation, not a surprise.
Sure am glad redditors get to speculate and make shit up
I’m confused. If it’s found only in Europe, how is it shared?
Yeah it’s poorly worded
It orginated in europe
Shared ancestory
mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother
So either:
Native American men came to Europe and then went back, Native American come from Europe or Women came with Leif Erikson to America and consensually or non-consensually hooked up with natives.
After Leif Erikson established Vinland in Newfoundland there were a rise in Native stories about a tall, red haired, light skin tribe. And for survival most likely did intermingled.
Yeah, but if it’s only found in Europe, then by definition it’s not found in North America.
Because sharing is caring.
I think people are making it a little deeper going into DNA analysis and such.
One typically would think of Vikings as a big group of men raping and pillaging their way across the land to bring home their plunder. If a mitochondrial DNA from Europe is present, that means that there were Viking women out there, procreating as well. These children lived and bred and so presumably settled in the New World. This shatters the illusion most people have of what a Viking conquest might look like.
Im no Norse scholar, so take what i say for a grain of salt
You are correct, Vinland was a farming/trading settlement, not a raider base. Full families lived there. The Sagas talk about their wives, one of whom became the de facto leader of the settlement. Their contact with the Skraelings were mostly peaceful. At first, the only point of contention was that Vinlanders would not trade away or teach them how to make iron tools and weapons.
The fallout happened when three Skraelings were mistaken for boat thieves by a scouting expedition near the mouth of the St. Lawrence and were executed by the Vinlanders. One of them was either a friend or relation to the local Skraeling chief. The 'upper classmen' fled back to Greenland after the reprisals started. The Greenland Sagas end there.
From this, we can infer that, at a minimum, some Vinland women and children were taken by the Skraelings and either kept as slaves or integrated into the tribe. They bred with the Skraelings and their children or children's children became full tribe members.
The Viking colonies were destroyed and the women captured
or they just intermarried
If they intermarried you’d expect non-mitochondrial DNA to make it down stream, but honestly this is meme with no source listed so the original intent of the meme is probably just some racist asshat or blackpiller malding that European women are having children outside their race
Yeah, a Croatoa-like event is far more likely. If not all the Vinlanders made it back to Greenland and they would have moved to live with the Skraelings after their connection east was cut off.
I wonder if any Athabaskans claimed their ancestors could speak with stones, like the blue-eyes Croatoans claimed their ancestors could speak with books.
North African population today is not of the same DNA makeup as it was centuries ago. Was basically south Mediterranean.
People believe anything these days.
"These days" this has been true all along
Ah ah great one !
Powerhouse DNA
the mitochondria is the powerhouse of myhouse.wad
They're making fun of conspiracy theories about African descendants being the "true" Hebrews and Native Americans. Basically, Africans discovered the Americas, wrote the Bible, and built the pyramids, and the descendants of the people who actually did those things are racist imposters.
I don’t think that’s the case at all….
Banging in the new world!
https://preview.redd.it/5r1p9bnqjz6g1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=26dbcf00c9a4d73845550b0973506f0fc0ec7a19
Hi this is Phillip J Fry here, basically the Native American men got Snu-snued :D
Mitochondrial DNA is passed through the mother so the implication is that they wiped out some American tribe/s, then kidnapped the females and brought them back to procreate with them.
...no.
It implies that European women had children with native men, who then stayed in the americas. Which is plausible given that we know there were Norse settlements in North America.
Im not sure where youre getting the "wiped out" part, or really anything else you said, you are a deeply confused person. Wer'e saying that European maternal DNA was in the americas not the other way around
Seems to me viking women came to north america and colonized the men.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.
Viking men did their Viking thing and ran off with native women-hence why only mitochondrial dna was found in Europe as it’s passed from mother to daughter in an unbroken chain.
This is the reverse. Native European mdna was found in post Vinland contact natives. The Vinland women had Snu-Snu with Skraeling men.
I bet John Redcorn knows what's up....
I like the thought of Viking women pillaging and raping while their husbands are at the long house taking care of the goats and corn.
...I'm not speaking like Orm from Norsemen or anything.
I know it seems rose-tinted, but why is no one just suggesting that maybe some settlers just... fell in love? Met a tribe, had good relations, and intermarried because they didn't have conceptualization of "races" as we do??
Or just like Roanoke, some Vinland colony collapsed and the locals joined native tribes to survive because they lacked the knowledge to survive alone.
So, while Vikings/Norse people absolutely did the raping and pillaging thing often, that wasn't all they did. They also had farmers, craftsmen and traders. They are documented as being very open to trade with other races. They also had pretty progressive rights for women, so it could be that the women could have intermarried. While that is nice, Vikings also took part in the slave trade, which could be another explanation. Since there isn't much information about why Viking society did not flourish as noticeably, it could be any of these explanations. Alternatively, the Viking colonists could have been wiped out and the women taken, as others have implied.
TL;DR: Vikings are a bit more complex than their reputation would lead you to believe. We don't know much about Viking colonies in North America, so any combination of these explanations could be true.
[deleted]
Hey, Valkyries need Snu-Snu, too.
If it's found only in Europe, then how is it "shared"?
The post is badly worded. The mdna is native to Europe and was not found in America until after 1006. Children of Vinlandr women and Skraeling men stayed behind after the colony was abandoned.
So this mitochondrial DNA that they found in pre-colonial native Americans is only found in Europe? Funny, because I'm pretty sure it was also found in America...
The Mitochondria is the power house of the cell.
the shock is usually when there's white dna in indenginous lines people think rape. but a european women and indigenous man theres more of an idea of a loving relationship
Perhaps the first traces of prostitution and sex trafficking. The proud Vikings traded their wives for high-quality furs from the Native Americans.
The memer is surprised because it overturns the narrative that white people were predatory and native Americans were innocent. Mitochondrial dna comes from a Viking woman, so that means the dna mixing didn’t come exclusively from whites raping natives.
So is the joke that people think that vikings were only men and are horrified to find proof that there were women vikings?
OMG! PEOPLE HAVE SEX! THIS PRODUCES CHILDREN! WHY HAVE THEY BEEN KEEPING THIS FROM US?
This is not an earth shattering revelation: All it means is that there were Norse women on the expedition that ended up in what is now commonly called Canada and some of them slept around. This is consistent with every other large scale Norse expedition.
Shorthand: "White people were here first!"
Hot take, there's no joke here. They either used the wrong meme template or the guy who made it is just stupid.
I dont know those big words but I know one of them is the powerhouse of the cell
Oops! That would have not been good!
Reddit is weirdly obsessed with glorifying viking raiders.
If it’s only found in europe….
Wait til you find out about the strangeness of Rhesus Hormone present or not in blood. It’s like there was an earth human mixed with something otherworldly at some point.
People like to look surface and say it’s just a mutation but that doesn’t make sense with natural selection or how ancient it is.
The meme suggests that 1.the Vikings abducted Native American women and brought them back to Europe and/or 2. Indigenous people killed off any/all mixed-race children birthed by Norse settlers and/or 3. The Norse were so strict in their control over their own women not a single one was able to birth the child of an Indigenous father and/or 4. The Norse women were so racist not a single one slept with an Indigenous man.
In reality the scale and duration of Early Medieval Norse attempts to settle North America were so miniscule that lopsided data like this isn't surprising.
The post is badly worded. The mdna is native to Europe and was not found in America until after 1006. Children of Vinlandr women and Skraeling men stayed behind after the colony was abandoned.
A certain subsect of American white people think they're the descendents of vikings.
Viking men took back women from all over the world, including native americans
I thought everyone knew this. Vikings found North America long ago but didnt stay long, they clashed with natives a few times from what I understand and lost, there must have been some kind of peace at one point because of the shared DNA. They fucked. Maybe rape, but idk how likely it is that natives would have raped a Nordic POW and kept her alive to carry the child and then allow the child to live among the tribe. So my guess is some chose to stay and earned the trust of the tribe. I love history
This is really super simple. They were super into the idea of viking men raping in North America, but not as into viking women starting relationships with natives.
Subtext meaning that might be missed: anyone on reddit using words like "mitochondrial" in memes are Joe Rogan fans and antivaxxers. Probably. Good chance of it. Also, deep seated racist beliefs. Like the kind of person who would be upset to find out that white women from Europe chose to "breed" with "brown people" or "savages" over other white men who presumably came to the New World with them.
Then it’s not found only in Europe?
Genuinely, I think a fair few Puritan women (remember that the English have a fair amount of Viking ancestry) who were "kidnapped" actually fucked off into the woods because being a woman in Puritan New England was absolutely hellish.
"Oh so there is a community a day's walk away that doesn't think midwifery is witchcraft? So I might actually survive childbirth??? Peace fools."
Yes. There is a whole body of these “kidnapping” accounts, which are referred to as “foundational captivity narratives,” in academia.
I have to think that the creator thought that that shared DNA was a spontaneous coincidence in evolution, and was surprised that its actually a result of interbreeding and that vikings made it to america at some point. or maybe theyre saying vikings got cucked in america, idk
"Cool, vikings and native Americans share DNA."
Realization: It's because native American women were moved to Europe as (sex) slaves by the vikings.
Red man fuck pale woman instead pale man fuck red woman.