Why There Was No Single Viking Look

A man buried at Varnhem in Sweden, sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries, carried DNA linked to brown eyes and dark hair. We know him only as sample VK42, grave 62 in a churchyard of at least 2,000 graves. In 2020 a team led by Ashot Margaryan sequenced 442 people from across the Viking world, his tooth among them. Run through a forensic model called HIrisPlex, his genome gave brown eyes a 98% probability and blond hair only 15%. 📖 Source: Margaryan et al., Population genomics of the Viking world, Nature 585 (2020) A woman buried in Norse Greenland came out the opposite: blue eyes, and most likely blond hair. The study found no single Viking look. Set against 20,551 Danes born between 1981 and 2005, 148 Viking Age Scandinavians stood out on only one of sixteen traits, black hair, and the authors cannot yet say why. In Orkney, a man buried with a bronze ring-pin and half a silver penny of King Edmund lived a Norse life, with ancestry mostly like today's Scots and Irish. A woman buried nearby, with no grave goods, showed the same. Being a Viking was a way of life, not always a bloodline. The Viking in your head is blond. The man at Varnhem probably wasn't. This channel is made on musayko.com, a platform I built for creators, and it's open to you too. What else does the Viking in your head get wrong?