![\"Handsome](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SEI_234773330-bbcb.jpg\")
\n\t\tVikings have long had a special place in British lore (Picture: Getty Images)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\tVikings have long had a special place in British lore (Picture: Getty Images)<\/p>\n
The Vikings<\/a> were, among other things, Nordic raiders, plunderers and slaughterers intent on conquering England<\/a>. <\/p>\n They also may have been a tad homesick.<\/p>\n There\u2019s long been a belief that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who scuffled with Roman gladiators in the fourth century. <\/p>\n And after the first\u00a0binge-drinking Danish Vikings got to Britain in the eighth century, the DNA of these bloodthirsty buccaneers who raped and pillaged\u00a0their way to glory got into the British gene pool.<\/p>\n But the remains of a man found in York could rewrite history altogether. <\/p>\n \t\t\t\tSign up for all of the latest stories\t\t\t<\/p>\n Start your day informed with Metro’s News Updates<\/a><\/strong> newsletter or get Breaking News<\/a> <\/strong>alerts the moment it happens. <\/p>\n York is famous for Vikings, with the city captured by surprisingly peaceful Viking farmers and craftsmen in 866.<\/p>\n So the 25% man\u2019s ancestry being Scandinavian might not be too much of a shock. Except that the man lived between the second and fourth centuries \u2014 long before Norse rule \u2013 and was likely a Roman soldier or gladiator.<\/p>\n \t\t \u2018This highlights that there were people with Scandinavian ancestry in Britain earlier than the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods which started in the fifth century AD,\u2019 the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research centre in London that made the discovery, said.<\/p>\n The institute\u2019s findings, published\u00a0in the journal Nature<\/a>, are part of a large-scale study to map how people moving around Europe shapes ancestry.<\/p>\n By analysing thousands of human remains in mainland Europe between 1 and 1,000 CE, they found three distinct waves of migration after the Romans crumbled at the start of the first millennium.<\/p>\n Two waves saw people from northern Germany or Scandinavia \u2013 the seafaring Vikings included \u2013 pack their bags and move to western, central and eastern Europe. <\/p>\n However, the team found evidence of a migration between the two taking place from 500 to 800 AD that saw people move in the opposite direction, with some Europeans moving northwards into Scandinavia.<\/p>\n When looking at the teeth of people buried on the Swedish island of \u00d6land, for example, scientists found people who carried ancestry from Central Europe who had grown up locally.<\/p>\n \t\t This suggests, they said, \u2018that this northward influx of people wasn\u2019t a one-off, but a lasting shift in ancestry\u2019.<\/p>\n DNA is a tricky thing to get a grip on. While tracking big changes \u2013 such as between humans today and the ape-like creatures we evolved from \u2013 can be done, subtle shifts over a few hundred years between genetically similar people are a tall order. <\/p>\n \u2018Twigstats\u2019, as the researchers dubbed their new technique, could change all of that. <\/p>\n Experts peeked into 1,500 genomes from people who lived in Europe in the first millennium to see how many shared the same genetic mutations. <\/p>\n Overtime, the scientists made family trees with every \u2018twig\u2019 being a tiny change in DNA \u2013 hence the name.<\/p>\n \u2018Twigstats\u00a0allows us to see what we couldn\u2019t before, in this case migrations all across Europe originating in the north of Europe in the Iron Age, and then back into Scandinavia before the Viking Age,\u2019 said Leo Speidel, the lead author of the study and a group leader at Riken, a research institute in Japan.<\/p>\n \u2018Our new method can be applied to other populations across the world and hopefully reveal more missing pieces of the puzzle.\u2019<\/p>\n Peter Heather, a professor of medieval kistory at King\u2019s College London, and co-author of the study, added: \u2018Historical sources indicate that migration played some role in the massive restructuring of the human landscape of western Eurasia in the second half of the first millennium AD which first created the outlines of a politically and culturally recognisable Europe, but the nature, scale and even the trajectories of the movements have always been hotly disputed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018Twigstats\u00a0opens up the exciting possibility of finally resolving these crucial questions.\u2019<\/p>\n Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk<\/a>.<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n For more stories like this, <\/strong>check our news page<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Danish](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SEI_234773329-fee3.jpg\")
\n\t\tDanish Vikings were a driving force of a third wave of migration identified by the researchers (Picture: Getty Images\/iStockphoto)<\/p>\n![\"Mad](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SEI_234742479-c13e.jpg\")
\n\t\tResearchers used a novel DNA analysis technique to discover the very-much-not-a-Viking-man\u2019s Nordic ancestry (Picture: Shutterstock \/ Nejron Photo)<\/p>\n