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Authentic Viking DNA From 1,000-Year-Old Skeletons
FiReaNGeL writes "Scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers. Analysis of DNA from the remains of ancient humans provides valuable insights into such important questions as the origin of genetic diseases, migration patterns of our forefathers and tribal and family patterns. Using freshly sampled material from ten Viking skeletons from around AD 1,000, from a non-Christian burial site on the Danish island of Funen, Dissing and colleagues showed that it is indeed possible to retrieve authentic DNA from ancient humans."
Next step is to clone them and open a theme park, right?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Just imagine how awesome the theme parks could be if they were populated by real, genetically correct vikings. Oh wait...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Now we can reincarnate the vikings. Good job.
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
This should be interesting. I wonder if we'll find out one of the Native American Tribes was heavily interbred with some vikings.
In any case, the really interesting thing is that this will really show us how each race of humans developed and spread, and who came from who.
Of course, we'll find that it all started 6,000 years ago, in a garden in the Middle East...
Wait... so 1,000 years old is ancient? And here all along I thought the western roman empire ended in 476 AD, not 1008 AD. Time to re-write those history books.
Not more spam!
I have some of the viking in my mish-mash genetic make up - they were very good, after all, at getting their genes spread widely.
perhaps this research will confirm my suspicion that the Viking lineage is where I acquired my most powerful gene
Read my Very Short "Stories"
How drastically would their DNA differ from that of current Norweigians, Swedes, and Danes? I dare not mention the Finns, lest some the Scandinavians go viking-shit on me.
But seriously, though; has the modern gene pool been dramatically changed due to southern neighbors migrating north?
My favorite place to hang out in the summer, is a scandinavian bar. If you go up on the roof, you'll find authentic viking DNA all over the place...
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.
How about we take the mice that have been loaded with the Tassie Tiger (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/20/132238) and load some others with the DNA of the Vikings and let's see who dominates!
The winner can take on mice bred with the dinosour DNA taken from fossilized mosquitos!
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
For the lazy, the samples found were:
All of those are found in Europe to varying degrees; the only item of note is that the K and one of the H samples had no exact matches when compared to a database containing over 15,000 mtDNA sequences.
Sure, contamination is a big problem, but it isn't like this hasn't been done before.
The problem is that you're trying to take very small traces of human DNA and greatly amplify it. Even a very small amount of contamination from the researchers or lab environment can introduce as much or more modern DNA than the ancient DNA being studied - so you end up sequencing the lab's janitor instead of the viking.
For example, here is a list of ancient humans who have had mitochondrial DNA sequences taken. (There are also Neandertal sequences not listed here.)
So I'd say this is a good job, and good science, but not at all a first.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
And I'll pump you all the viking DNA you'll ever want!
I used to live next to one of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles
TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KUBRICK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER.
I always thought it would be the Vikings! Jupiter is Valhalla?
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Authentic vikings still walk the earth today.
This is the only creature Chuck Norris is afraid of.
"But I swear, I'm making this hot blonde Scandinavian chick for the advancement of science!"
So why would it matter if the burial site is Christian or no-Christian? Last time I checked one dead body is as dead as another, wouldn't just saying "from a burial site on the Danish island of Funen" be more textualy efficent ;)
..."Viking" literally means "pirate"... Excellent... now we can clone an army of them to combat global warming!a Beowulf cluster of these.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Pff... if they want to do it properly they should announce that there are holes in the DNA which they had to fill out with DNA from genetically engineered dinosaurs.
Really, they'd be unstoppable. A Viking-Velociraptor with a battleaxe and the speed of a cheetah...*drool*
Succes should of course be measured in imperial amounts of pillaged monestaries per hour or raped peasantry per minute.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
As a Scandinavian, I am compelled to invoke the Slashdot meme:
I am a genetically correct viking, you insensitive clod!
I lost my sig.
Probably no change at all. Scandinavia has never been pillaged or conquered with mass invasions by foreign soldiers.
:)
However, There are a high percent of foreign female(!) genes in Scandinava. Apparently, 30% of the females in Iceland have Irish genes (mtDNA), whereas less than five per cent of the men (Y-chromosome) have it. We can probably guess how the women came there, but I'm not so sure about the men...
SPAM
Chuck Norris could so kick that guy's ass.
will freak out in front of those 1,000-Year-Old ancient Viking skeleton overlords!
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, allegedly one single Berserker held the bridge and blocked Harold Godwinson's advance long enough for Harald Sigurdsson's army to assemble. Essentially denied Godwinson the element of surprise.
One guy. Vs the whole freaking Saxon army. What was _left_ of that Saxon army after the battle, was still enough to put up a battle at Hastings, so the original size must have been even more impressive.
I dunno, I'd vote that this is one of those cases where one should resist trying to improve what's perfectly good as it is. I'm not sure if the velociraptor genes wouldn't actually make it worse. And not in a good way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Excellent! We can now soon expect Hitler On Ice and Jews In Space!
å møøse ønce bit my sister
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
So easy, a caveman could do it!
That's what happens when you clone Vikings
Or is everyone too sick of the Marvel Universe these days...
If they get the first sentence completely wrong, I'm not going to bother with the rest of the article.
(Viking literally means a person who comes from a bay or similar.)
Sorry, but that has already been done
inauthentic DNA? Would that be RNA?
Were that I say, pancakes?
Or how about Spam on a stick?
(Bloody Vikings!)
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I got some authentic viking DNA for you right HERE.
My mtDNA is T2 so I guess that means mom was descended from Vikings... The Vikings were raiding Ireland before AD 1000 and carrying out the most winsome lasses so I'd guess that's where some of the mtDNA came from. Ancient Celtic Warriors: Vikings and Irish at War Viking Settlemnent in Ireland
Jus' for you, it'll be raining penis in no time. The only vagina that'll be found is from the scalped crotching that will become of you. Besides, we never have seen a true male yet; we've only seen females developed with an extra enzyme that causes the genitalia to invert. Hell, there are even bearded ladies. What would a male look like?
without prejudice
You can't take the sky from me...
Too bad Phil's not around to play a Cloned Viking Lawyer.
1000 years old bones? Yeah, right... what kind of viking is that?? Sounds quite dead to me!
:P
We still walk the earth, even if those NWO-illuminati-Jeou-know-who-guys want to see us dead.
Bring your babes to Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden... etc. to get some fresh viking DNA!
Are those resurrectors the same guys that tried to bomb us into oblivion last time? lol
Kill first, ressurect later? Still jealous about our absolutely ph33rable superiority?
You better bring a sense of humor next time, thats much better for the DNA trannsfer.
89 FTW!
Cool. I want my next son to be a Viking!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...if I ever go to Scandanavia, if I ever visit a bar there, never, ever, to go up to the roof.
Apparently they're going to bring back the Knights of Standards and Practices.
http://www.planearium.de/scripts-502.htm
Meecrob!
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
I'm assuming that the majority of Slashdotters are proscience and not pro-Creationism. In the interest of maintaining scientific temper on this forum, may I request Slashdotters to employ the more secular 'CE' -- Common Era -- rather than the forthrightly Christian 'AD' -- Anno Domini, meaning, 'In the Year of Our Lord'. I think most here, including myself, have utmost respect for Jesus and his followers even we don't necessarily consider him to be 'Our Lord'. The usual response is, 'Who cares? Nobody knows exactly what AD means, anyway. And it's become established so why change it.' I would there are many perfectly rational individuals who might object to the above response. The corresponding term for 'BC' is 'BCE' -- Before Common Era. Thanks. No flames please!
If you read your own link, although the Vikings were mostly without their armours, they had managed to assemble into a shield wall formation. That's quite a far cry from being slaughtered in their sleep.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That much is actually obvious. You can't stall an army in the plains even if you're made of steel as one guy, because worst case scenario they just go around you. But still, you know, the odds were hideously against him anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
- Ray Stevens.
It's 1/10th the price.
In the early 10th century, Scandanavians were regularly used as mercenary forces by Constantinople. By the end of the tenth century, Basil II formed the Varangian Guard, a personal army he knew would always be loyal to him. By the late Byzantine era, the Varangian Guard essentially acted as king makers whenever civil wars between disputants to the throne broke out. But that is neither here nor there. 1000 years ago from today is usually considered to be the medieval era rather than antiquity. Rather than extracting DNA bones from an ancient, TFA points to extracting DNA from the bones of a medieval.
I think you mean
We can finally have a cluster of Beowulf's!
I thought you could only have those in Soviet Russia, just goes to showI bet they find they could not win a super bowl back then either.
Being of only modestly muddled Viking DNA myself, I'll be interested to see if they soon prove what I've often said. That "Everyone is a little bit Scandinavian".
Modern English didn't exist by Old English was definitely in widespread use by the 11th century.
There was extensive trade between Italy and Spain in Europe and various parts of what is present day China along ocean-going routes, albeit with a hop and a skip over land through Egypt.
Several republics had come and gone including ones at Cordoba in Spain and at Thessalonica in Greece.
The Castilian dialect of Spanish had been in use for at least a century.
A heliocentric view of the solar system had been adopted through a good deal of the western world for almost a thousand years. The earth being at the center of the solar system didn't achieve widespread acceptance until far later when it was decided by the Church of Rome to not be a matter of science but of theology.
The Roman Empire did still exist, as it did right up until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.
Europe was largely divided along eastern and western lines into predominantly Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox areas, but not exclusively so. Large areas remained very Pagan.
The average person may have never traveled more than seven miles from the place of his or her birth but communication via letter across the oceans was more common than you might think.
I have to admit ignorance with regards to most of western europe, but in Byzantium estimates at the literacy rate at the time approached 30%. And even in the west, there are non-Church documents that go back to the eleventh century.
...finding out you're actually related to someone born almost 10,000 ago.
A thousand years seems a pittance when they were able to find a local history teacher was a relation to the "Cheddar Man" via mitochondrial DNA -- which is inherited unchanged on the maternal line. (BTW, that's a professor and a researcher at London's Natural History Museum, not the descendant, in the photo.)
The search for a descendant came about as, "Dr. Larry Barham, a Texas-born archaeologist at Bristol University, said the finding "adds to the evidence that Britons came from a race of hunter-gatherers who later turned to farming because they found it was to their advantage." Archeologists believe Cheddar Man, who lived during the Stone Age, was a hunter-gatherer.
Opponents of this theory argue that Britons are descendants of Middle Eastern farmers."
Talk about tracing your family tree!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
I'm more worried about the Yul Brenner character. Jurassic was fun, but Westworld is scary.
and no mention of the techno viking? I'm appalled, Slashdotters.
Look out, Drew Carey!
That DNA is so metal
Everyone loves vikings.
I'm a Norwegian. There havn't been any migration from south to Scandinavia, if you exclude the last 15 years. That makes most scandinavians vikings.
We were good at producing food, but not good enough. So whene food and land [e.g. Norway is mountaionus) was running short we'd invade and settle in another country.
We attacked and kept parts of Britain and parts of France.
A modern part of this "space problem" was the mass-migration to USA during the 1800 and 1900's.
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