They Found 41 Vikings in a Ship. The DNA Changed Everything

In 2008, a work crew on a quiet island in Estonia dug a trench and found 41 armed men buried inside two ships. Everyone assumed they were Vikings. They were right. But these men went into the ground around the year 750, a full generation before the Viking Age was supposed to have begun. This is the story of the Salme ship burials, one of the strangest discoveries in Viking archaeology. We look at how the ships survived only as ghostly outlines of iron in the soil, the swords and gaming pieces buried alongside the dead, the brutal way these men were killed, and the chemistry locked in their teeth that traced them back across the sea to central Sweden. And then there is what their DNA revealed years later about who these men truly were to one another. Some questions the grave finally answered. Others, like who killed them and why they ever came, it has kept for more than 1,200 years. Subscribe for more discoveries that quietly rewrite the history we were all taught. #Vikings #Archaeology #History #VikingAge #Estonia #AncientHistory #SalmeShips #Documentary