Scientists who have studied the genetic past of an Icelandic family now claim the first Americans reached Europe a full five centuries before Columbus bumped into an island in the Bahamas during his first voyage of discovery in 1492.Additional information at The Guardian.
Researchers said today that a woman from the Americas probably arrived in Iceland 1,000 years ago, leaving behind genes that are reflected in about 80 Icelanders today...
"As the island was practically isolated from the 10th century onwards, the most probable hypothesis is that these genes correspond to an Amerindian woman who was taken from America by the Vikings some time around the year 1000," Carles Lalueza-Fox, of the Pompeu Fabra university in Spain, said.
18 November 2010
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Not unlikely, given that there are historical reports of Eskimo s turning up in British (IIRC Scotland) ports in the 1800's.
ReplyDeleteDaBris
The spin put on this has been "americans found us before we found them" However, the reality is that Norse explorers definitely built settlements in Greenland, about 980 a.d.
ReplyDeleteThe Vinland sagas detail travels to and settlements made in a land further south and west, and in 1960 remains of a viking village were found at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. Artifacts here were identical to items found in Norway and Iceland, there's no doubt it was a european colony, trading settlement. It's generally believed that these people traded far into the St Lawrence gulf.
In the course of that commerce, their party picked up at least one native american, who travelled with them to Iceland, and whose dna leaves its trace in some southern Icelanders today.
It's my conjecture that this would have been a young woman, rather than a man. Norsemen were always somewhat short of women in their settlements, because it was always fairly easy to recruit fighters, sailors, and adventurers, to travel unproven routes far beyond the horizon. Young women, for some reason I can't quite fathom, were more likely to refuse to get into a leaky, ill-provisioned boat to travel west on the freezing grey waters of the stormy north atlantic.
Thus, when these hard living, hard fighting men happened upon a village they could plunder, part of that plunder was often taken in the form of women.
So our north-american 'discoverer' of europe, was most probably a young native american woman, possibly taken as an unwilling slave or concubine, she almost certainly never returned home, and she almost certainly never reached europe.
Hardly what we normally understand of a "Discoverer", when she was probably bundled aboard as protesting cargo.
Iceland, by the way, is the above-sea thrust of the mid-atlantic ridge. Its inhabitants came from europe, but Iceland is no more europe than Hawaii is america.