First American in Europe 'was native woman kidnapped by Vikings and hauled back to Iceland 1,000 years ago'
By Niall Firth
Last updated at 7:47 PM on 17th November 2010
A native woman kidnapped by the Vikings may have been the first American to arrive in Europe around 1,000 years ago, according to a startling new study.
The discovery of a gene found in just 80 Icelanders links them with early Americans who may have been brought back to Iceland by Viking raiders. The discovery means that the female slave was in Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus first paraded American Indians through the streets in Spain after his epic voyage of discovery in 1492.
The genes that the woman left behind have now been discovered in the DNA of just four distinct family lines.
Replicas of Viking sod houses at L'Anse Aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The area holds the earliest evidence of Viking raiders arriving in the Americas
Any early suggestion that the genes were from Asia were ruled out after it was worked out that they had been present in Iceland since at least the 18th century – long before Asian genes appeared in Icelanders. The team found that the genes they studied can be traced to common ancestors in the south of Iceland, near the Vatnajˆkull glacier, in around 1710.
It has long been thought that Viking raiders arrived in the Americas centuries before Columbus ever arrived in the Caribbean. Norse epic sagas such as ‘Erik the Red’, talk of early Scandavian settlers discovering lush new lands, with a temperate climate and abundant crops – now believed to be parts of northern Canada.
A Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in the eastern Canadian region of Newfoundland, is thought to date to the 11th century. Other such settlements are found in Greenland, which Viking navigators reached from Iceland.
Because Iceland was isolated from the rest of the world from the 11th century onwards scientists speculate that the woman must have been taken from the Americas sometime around the year 1000.
The DNA lineage, named C1e, is mitochondrial – which means that the genes were introduced by a woman.
The unknown American woman was probably abducted from the Americas and then brought to Iceland after surviving the sea voyage back. She then bore children in her new home but nothing was ever written of her existence or fate.
The study will be published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. ...
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz15gcL6Sz4
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