People from Britain or Ireland may have reached the remote Faroe Islands before the Vikings, new evidence suggests
People from Britain or Ireland may have reached the remote Faroe Islands before the Vikings, according to new evidence.
"You see the sheep DNA and the biomarkers start all at once. It's like an off-on switch," said Dr William D'Andrea, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.The scientists say these new results provide "unequivocal" evidence of a human presence before the Vikings arrived in the 9th Century AD.
According to Medieval texts, the early Irish navigator St Brendan set out across the Atlantic with comrades from 512 to 530, and supposedly found a land dubbed the Isle of the Blessed. Later, in 825 AD, the Irish monk Dicuil wrote that some northern islands had been settled by hermits for at least 100 years.
DNA evidence shows that people who live on the islands today derive most of their paternal ancestry from Scandinavians, but most of their maternal ancestry comes from British or Irish people. This pattern, of Celtic women having children with Scandinavian males, is seen in Iceland too and has previously been interpreted as a hallmark of Vikings transporting non-native women on their voyages.
Starting at 51cm down in the sediments, they found signs that large numbers of sheep had suddenly arrived, most likely some time between 492 and 512, but possibly as early as 370. A layer of ash deposited from a known Icelandic volcano eruption in 877 helped them reliably date the sediment sequences below.
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