[hrafn]

As usual, the university's public relations summary of the paper does not match the claims the paper makes. It makes grandiose claims of debunkings and is written from the point of view of whatever societal issue is popular today (identity and population movement).

Link to preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334525855_Populatio...

I'm not seeing any claims there that are new. It is cool to have more data on spread of culture and genes, but we've already had most of that for decades.

[interfixus]

Project leader professor Eske Willerslev is - as far as I can ascertain - a highly competent and accomplished scientist, but with pattern of political leanings informing his scientific output and media appearances, of which there have been not a few over the years, at least in his native Denmark.

From reports of this paper I have so far read, it doesn't really - despite claims - challenge what we know of the vikings, their comings and goings, and their genetic makeup. Their iron age ancestors were a mixed bunch a thousand years earlier, and those we call vikings had been out and about for centuries all over Europe. Educated common knowledge is well aware that they probably har a variety of looks much like modern Scandinavians.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Everything is politics, so saying ''politics informs his scientific output'' like it is some kind of gotcha makes absolutely no sense.

And it is necessary to continue to reiterate the same basic facts when new evidence continues to support it. For a variety of reasons all kinds of ideas that have been debunked decades ago about the past are still mainstream. And some people get really angry when current historians tell them that those views are wrong because it clashes with their current political ideas and views. Just look at the pure evil shit Mary Beard, a well-respected classicist, got when she dared say that during Roman times there were black people in England (a well-established fact by now).

Unfortunately the alt-right has also taken hold of the past, and they continue to spread all kinds of lies so they can continue to spread their idea of the past, namely that of a white past where non-white people did not exist (just look at the outrage you see when a medieval fantasy tv show casts non-white actors). So more evidence that Scandinavia was also populated by people from southern Europe and Asia is always welcome (even though it wont do a thing to convince people who hold racist views and ideals).

[FooBarBizBazz]

The fact that Britain and Scandinavia were, in ancient and early Medieval times, actually very diverse places, is interesting, because within living memory those places are /believed/ to have been > 90% "white".

This raises a number of possibilities for where those beliefs come from:

Option 1: It really is true that, around 1950, those places were > 90% "white", but in ancient times they did not used to be. This would mean that the diversity present in ancient times had subsequently been forced out, either via systematic oppression that motivated out-migration, or via active genocide.

Option 2: Census and other data from the past century were systematically falsified, consistently and at a large scale, to support the regime of white supremacy that then dominated Europe, when in fact those populations were considerably more diverse; non-"white" people were just "officially invisible". Moreover, the commonly-reported subjective memories of older people who say they remember such a time are in fact misimpressions -- because memory, as we know, is unreliable, strongly affected by whatever the social reality is.

In other words, either

- large-scale population replacement occurred in these places within just the recent past, or

- the past is tremendously mutable, in which case nothing you understand as history, nor indeed anything you think you remember, can actually be trusted.

Either conclusion would be very compatible with your opening point that everything is really politics.

[goto11]

You are conflating "diverse" with "non-white", but I think that is anachronistic. The non-Scandinavian DNA referred to is from eastern Europe and Baltics, British isles, central and southern Europe and so forth. That is pretty diverse - but all would be considered "white" by present day standards.

Interesting the study also shows no Eskimo, Inuit or Native American DNA. Not surprising, but is would be really cool if there were some Native American DNA among viking-age Scandinavians.

[goto11]

> I'm not seeing any claims there that are new.

I think you are understating the results, even if the summary overblown how "disrupting" the results are. There is a number of interesting findings in the paper.