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barrenko 2026-02-23 16:58 UTC link

The OG founders.

jmyeet 2026-02-23 17:10 UTC link

I suspect this is an example of us seeing history through a mdoern lens and making false assumptions. For example, the idea that a nation project or an empire is genetically homogenous is a relatively modern concept. The truth is that empires incorporated various ethnic groups and those ethnic groups survived for long periods of time.

The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.

The British Empire spanned the globe.

In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.

Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.

guywithahat 2026-02-23 17:13 UTC link

I feel like this is common in most (at least western) empires. Vikings from Sweden would take over territory as far as Poland or even Italy and recruit new soldiers. Eventually some of them would end up in warrior style graves. What's actually more interesting in my mind is that they didn't bring people back, and so the gene pool in Sweden remained more or less unchanged

ecshafer 2026-02-23 17:48 UTC link

I am not sure why they used this title for this study as that is not the important part. We already have known Viking was a job description, thats been known for hundreds of years. We also knew that viking settlement was widespread. This study used DNA sequencing to settle the debate on if vikings from certain areas went to certain areas, and if they mixed. It seems to confirm the theory that the norse did NOT mix, and traded, raided and settled different areas separately.

coldtea 2026-02-23 17:59 UTC link

It was both.

ghostoftiber 2026-02-23 18:08 UTC link

The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.

philwelch 2026-02-23 18:15 UTC link

This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.

It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.

The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.

kleton 2026-02-23 18:20 UTC link

It's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.

acadapter 2026-02-23 18:25 UTC link

It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.

jibal 2026-02-23 18:29 UTC link

Never trust the headline. From the article:

> And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.

bazoom42 2026-02-23 19:35 UTC link

The title is rather confused, because DNA cannot show how people understood a certain word. Historical sources like the sagas show how the word was understood.

danilocesar 2026-02-23 19:41 UTC link

And they didn't use emacs, because they were Vi-Kings

enjoykaz 2026-02-23 19:51 UTC link

The no-mixing part is what got me. If "viking" was just a job open to anyone, you'd expect genetic mixing in the burial sites. But Swedish groups went east, Danes south, Norwegians west — distinct genetic clusters throughout.

So it was a job, but one you apparently got by being born in the right place

VikingCoder 2026-02-23 21:53 UTC link

Well said.

geodel 2026-02-24 02:26 UTC link

I don't believe in it. Tomorrow they will say Software developer was just a job and they were not intellectually superior race who brought alien technology like NodeJS.

shevy-java 2026-02-24 11:05 UTC link

So who are vikings?

I think the two most common answers are "people before in Denmark" or "people before in Norway". There may not be an easy distinction here the more we step back into history, but personally I am leaning more towards the "old danes". It just seems to fit more.