What Happened to the Vikings? (Part 17)

well hi everyone Ken Ham CEO of Anson Genesis crisps museum in the Ark Encounter and I'm with one of our staff members they're one of our researchers speakers writers dr. Nathaniel Jenson has a PhD from Harvard University we're continuing this series on the new history of the world well it's not new from a biblical perspective but it is new from a respect of what most people have been taught and this is the new if you like history of the human race compared to what most people have been taught but really it's showing that research confirms biblical history now episode 17 what happened to the Vikings dr. Jensen this is going to be interesting in episode 18 which will be tomorrow night can we identify the Jews genetically wow this is gonna be really interesting but for this episode there some violent romanticize to this day the by kings of the Middle Ages command our attention even children's movies have taken up the Viking banner so what do we know about the history the legacy of their exploits after the Vikings plundered northern Europe what happened to them a thousand years after the peak of their power do any of their descendants roam Europe what about the Americans could you be related to the Vikings well let's find out dr. Jensen take it away so in this episode we want to know is it me or is it Ken who's a Viking or neither of us or could it be some of our viewers these are the these are the questions we want to try to address and of course a part of the larger question of who do we come from and what makes this serious so new is we're using genetics to try to unravel the connections among us I look at this slide each week I open with this and I feel like even my own perspective of all this has changed as we've gone along and looking at the static view of today masks so much of the complexity that's come before and I find this all fascinating and the complexity of course involves our relationship to the ancient cultures as well and my preconceived notions about our relationships are changing I've promised a number of major conclusions that will reach along the way and some of them we've already seen we've seen that most Europeans of recent Asian ancestry you don't see the nationalities for very long in the family tree we're using the male inherited DNA the y chromosome to understand who's related to whom how closely or distantly ken and I are related how closely and distantly all of us are related we're gonna eventually see that so-called black white people exist Caucasians who have had dark-skinned ancestors in their family tree and don't even know it we've seen that the Americas were resettled at least once before Columbus and in the next week or two we're gonna look at some of the most ancient history the and it holds who do they come from what's their story they're always cast as primitive what what is their place in history and their relationship to us and my goal in all this is partially apologetic so if you're creationist watching you'd have new tools to defend your faith if you're a non creationist watching that this would challenge what you hold to be true but for all groups that we marvel at our own stories the stories of those we love but the history of the human race in a way we've never marveled at before if you were living on the northern European coast during the Middle Ages and you saw a ship like this approaching the shore you've probably terrified these Vikings have a well-established reputation at a well-established reputation back then and we're well known for the brutality their violence their plundering and that reputation continues to this day yet despite all that we've made movies like How to Train Your Dragon and even children's books are some of the most popular topics involve these these Viking people's so who were they what's what's their story and on the romantic side could any of us be related to them are there people walking around today who have vikings in their heritage just because this is now late in our series episode 17 i'm going to do the review very quickly we've seen episode 1 that the world is smaller than we think we're gonna see this with this viking story as well episode 2 that our family trees are more connected than we think doing the math of that family tree calculation we've seen that racial change can happen much more quickly than we think so are the Vikings today Caucasian people's if they have descendants we've seen that dramatic consequences of the genetics of racial change at the and and combined with reproductive date in episode 4 episodes 5 and 6 really are the foundation for this entire discussion we've been having because it shows that the y-chromosome DNA is inherited very quickly and in the end of the y-chromosome clock the rate at which the y-chromosome DNA sequence changes from generation generation fits exactly what the Bible says about the time scale for Humanity the number of DNA differences among all of us today go back just a few thousand years and we can use the fact that the paternally inherited DNA the Y chromosome gets passed on imperfectly as a clock we can we can use the number of Y chromosome differences to establish genealogical relationships so that if Ken and I are have very few DNA differences at the Y chromosome level between us we must have a recent common ancestor whereas if we have many Y chromosome differences between those who must have a distant common ancestor and you apply that principle around the globe you can reconstruct the family tree the history of humanity from it and this then represents the key to human history that we've been using as the basis to explore relationships around the globe globe episode 7 was looking for lost relatives in Europe we found them in India and we saw an episode 8 that the explanation has to do with the Mongol conquest and the aftermath of it episode episode 9 looked at a Chinese connection to Eastern Europe episode 10 looked at Western Europe which is really a lot of the history of the Americas because some of the Caucasian Americans trace their ancestry to Western Europe that hidden history shows that most Western Europeans Americans episodes episode 10 is goes back to Central Asia episode 11 we began to look at the pre-columbian history before the Europeans arrived and so on episode 11 even in mainstream science there's a dramatic revolution that's rewriting many of the stereotypes we've taken for granted and that are now shown to be wrong episode 12 was really a bombshell looking at how genetics shows that today's Native Americans are not the first Americans and this caused us episode 13 to take a new look at the Native American oral histories and we found profound parallels between what they've said is their history and what genetics is revealing episode 14 we looked at the implications for some of the archaeological history that's been discovered and how this new genetic discovery could impact the demise of civilizations like the Maya and give us new explanations new tools episode 15 we saw a connection between Native America and Europe that's found in Central Asia because both peoples come from that place episode 16 we looked at the first Americans and saw there could be some connection to the early Pacific peoples the Australian Aborigines and promised that perhaps there might be a way in the future to figure out who exactly his first Americans were well today we want to look at who the Vikings were and what happened to them stereotypically we view them as tall burly redheaded blond Scandinavian looking peoples is that true well the contemporary of them about a thousand years ago Muslim who was going in that direction in Russia said he saw all the Swedes and some of the Vikings were Swedes when they landed in camp beside the Volga Volga being mother rivers in Russia which we'll look at in the map in a moment I never saw a state Lierman they're as tall as palm trees ruddy cheek tanned with red hair so it appears that some of the stereotypes we've had fit what people documented at that time their homeland of course was in Scandinavia shown here in green the Volga River is over here in Russia why would a Muslim be encountering these people around the Volga River and giving us descriptions well the time they were ruling 700 - 900s ad was contemporary with the Muslim conquests of Muhammad and his descendants and you can see that part of the geographic reach of their kingdoms came up here to the edge of modern day Russia so the volga was right around here it's not that far there's not much distance then between the voyages the exploits of the Vikings and of the Muslims at that time in history it wasn't just the Volga though you can see in shaded here in green again that their homeland is Scandinavia Denmark Norway Sweden so forth they made voyages and settled Iceland of course they also made it eventually over to the Americas but not permanently as far as we know they famously plundered the British Isles the northern coast of Europe France and such Normandy they made their way into Russia ruse that Russia was settled by Vikings and you can see by these blue lines they were all over Europe even eventually becoming mercenaries for the byzantine empire the Varangian guard was viking an origin so if these people ruled europe history tells us they did and if they left descendants to this day what would be the genetic evidence of that how would we know if some of us today are there have them in our family tree let's go to this study that we've been looking at frequently in our episodes together this is the thousand genomes project that sampled peoples around the globe not all the geographical extent but they sampled the major places of where the people are so India China western Africa Europe parts of the Americas our population centers places where people are heavily concentrated and we've been able to take the Y chromosomes from these people where you construct the family history and explore the implications of it so what would that what sort of genetic signature should we look for if the Vikings have left a sentence to this day well let's take their history forward they they begin to settle in those parts of the map that we just looked at at the at the end of the dark ages of Europe nine hundreds what happened in Europe afterwards are there any genetic signatures that should lie outside of Europe that could be a Viking origin did any Europeans leave Europe thereafter one of the major incursions outside of Europe following the Viking era were the Crusades movements of European peoples into the Middle East this is about the thousands 1200 ad these movements though weren't permanent they tried to retake Jerusalem and there was a back and forth back and forth and the Muslim armies eventually drove them out so there isn't much to speak of there we wouldn't necessarily expect much of a genetic signature in the Middle East because of these events we looked at the implications for the Russian conquests so this is movement from Moscow Europe I should say Eastern Europe pushing further east then into Asia with the dates of the Russian expansion shown here on the map so if there's Vikings in Russia we might expect to see these these signatures moving eastward then of course famously by the 1500 1600 begins the age of exploration in Europe of expansion with many of these major European powers seeking to colonize the globe the Spanish and Portuguese heavily in Americas France England elsewhere in the globe and of course we've talked about the phrase the Sun never sets on the British Empire being a descriptive rule of thumb at the height of the power of the British Empire so if we're looking at the signature of the the Vikings today and looking of what happened in Europe after the Viking era we say we should be looking for a signature of peoples who are in Europe and primarily only in Europe for about 500 years after the Viking era and then eventually they spread to the Americas if we're talking Spain France England during the Age of Exploration yes they were expansions in the Africa but rarely permanent one South Africa beginning being an exception we still have Caucasian descent peoples European descent peoples there to this day what else happen that could give us some clues to identifying the smoking gun so to speak of their existence and clues to their fate well let's broaden our look at Europe beyond just the indigenous Europeans because that's what I'm gonna call the the Vikings for the moment indigenous from the 700 onward we've talked in previous episodes about the steady flow of Central Asian peoples into Europe some of them being contemporary with and then post stating the conquests of the Vikings in Europe so you can see the dates here for many of these Central Asian groups of course we've talked about the Mongol incursions into Europe before the 1200 s which is several centuries after the Vikings and the signatures of that and together all of these Central Asian movements have contributed over around two-thirds of the genetic ancestry the male genetic ancestry of Europe today and of course because Europe is a dominant influence in the Americas heavy influence there as well so this is the history then that can guide our genetic exploration we're looking for a signature that's localized to Europe from 700 900 onwards before the age of exploration then this leads to some sort of echo in the Americas because Europeans go to the Americas but we're also gonna see given what we've already explored there's gonna be a heavy Central Asian influence independent of this and so this might mean that whatever signature we're looking for is likely going to be a minority of of the European lineages today so there's our smoking guns we're looking for something localized to Europe spreads to the Americas pretty much only in Europe not elsewhere on the globe because we don't see much in the way of European expansion until the very recent era the colonial era and this is probably going to be a minority of the lineages in Europe what about the side of the equation we've looked at what happens after the Vikings are there any clues that could tell us who they came from the the pre Viking history that could tell us other clues that might might give us some hints well prior to the Vikings that the first thing that comes to mind in terms of the the sequence of historical events is the fall of the Roman Empire so the Viking is about seven hundred for five hundred is when the Western Roman Empire Falls to the the so called Germanic tribe some of the central Asians I used to think it was primarily Central Asians and the Huns would fit that description they came in and then basically left but these other tribes the Goths the vandals the angles the Saxons I'm not convinced these worse necessarily Central Asian in origin the Goths for example claim that they have Scandinavian ancestry so these peoples may be indigenous Europeans as well and so they would be in Europe prior to the Vikings and they would share the same post Viking European history they're in Europe and so if we're looking for their signature again it's likely to have little evidence in the Middle East because even though the Crusaders came in they were kicked back out if anything they might have some signature and in the modern Russian principalities and they have some signatures in the the major colonial territories where there was more permanent residence the Americas being a major example so the only thing that changes in the clues that we're looking for is the total time scale so the Roman Empire Falls in four 500s and so for the 1500 years thereafter there's a heavy localized European signature with little outside of it so when we're looking for the Viking signature we're probably also going to see the signature of some of these Germanic and perhaps other scandinavian peoples like the the gauss so let's go back to this study and look at the european lineages one of the ones that immediately suggests itself as a candidate is a lineage a group that we have not discussed before this is group i we've not discussed it in any detail you can see from the colors already it's mainly this gold and grey basically Europe and the Americas it seems to be something that fits so just so you can here who were talking about you've got British Italians Peruvians and again because this isn't a cluster of heavy Europeans my expectation is and in my explanation at this point is all of these great lineages are likely peoples of European descent we've already seen in previous episodes that because of the major population collapse in the Americas the male lineages in Latin America are heavily European there's African influence and only a small minority about 20% of the Latin American lineages today look like they're the indigenous Native Americans and when I say indigenous I mean the ones that came over from Central Asia in the early ad era so there you have it there's Finnish there's British you can see again just same song second verse for this for this entire grouping so that seems to check a box for The Smoking Gun that we're looking for it's localized to Europe and the Americas that fits fine if you look at the depth of these lineages so this one up here fits the history of population growth that we've discussed it's this long flat line with a bunch of expansion in the recent past again we've talked about around the globe and in Europe the shape of human population growth this is a hockey stick shape where it's this gradual growth of peoples and boom in the last few hundred years it shoots upward this particular branch of I fits that these other ones are consistent with the overall picture and they have a deep branching lineage and that's significant because what it means is you have indigenous European peoples prior to the arrival of the Central Asians and again we're looking for if we're looking for the signature of Vikings and perhaps some of these other Germanic tribes and Scandinavian tribes that precede them we're looking for something that's here in Europe before all these other Central Asian peoples come in and so this seems to fit this group I there's a lot of branches here that are predating the Central Asian invasions the last clue that I want to point to is just how far back this lineage goes this can to the other lineages in this tree in the pre a thousand BC era so this may very well represent the lineage of some of the first peoples that were here in Europe and that eventually migrated to the Americas gen age of exploration so it's not just 1500 years in Europe it looks like it's even long before that so it's an ancient lineage so this again all this together checks checks these boxes and suggests itself as a good candidate for these lineages another clue to the possibility that this might be a Viking lineage if not more than that in Europe is the geographic distribution of it and the concentration of it so I said this is a primarily European lineage with echoes in the Americas so we can strip away these other populations and try to graphically visualize where and how concentrated this lineage is in Europe and the Americas and I'm gonna change the colors for the American populations to reflect the fact that we're only going to look at the European descent among these peoples in the Americas and I'm gonna move over that French group to the Americas because this particular group was residing in the Americas though they're of French descent so what's the concentration of this group I in these various populations let's begin with the right side that finished population it's at 26% and I'm drawing these circles and relative proportions to reflect the concentration so we can see at a glance where is this lineage located in the British populations it's around 15% and again these aren't hard fast absolute numbers it'll depend somewhat on sampling so it's 26 percent maybe plus or minus 5% it's around that area the point is when we look at and compare it to southern Europe Spain Italy Mediterranean groups it's much more concentrated in northern Europe versus southern it's only at a four percent level in Spain and in Italy and consistent with this north-south gradient France typically being more of a northern European country than a Mediterranean one these Utah residents of French descent also have this lineage at 24% in Latin America the Mexicans in Los Angeles the Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico the Colombians in Medellin and the Peruvians and Lima they have an average about 5% in this lineage which is consistent with what we discussed in previous episodes the history of Latin America is somewhat different from the history of Caucasian America I could say of US and Canada u.s. especially is heavily influenced by massive numbers of Western Europeans migrating there Latin America has much less absolute numbers of migration it's more and and the geography is different it's heavily Mediterranean Europe migrating to the Americas it's fewer numbers so it's some Europeans coming over and then multiplying in place whereas the u.s. it's more lots of people coming with some multiplication in place and so this historical migration connection to Mediterranean Europe I'd say finds its echo and the genetic proportions in Latin America the genetic proportion of this group I hear reflects historically what it is here now I want to bring this Utah group back to Europe so we can get a closer look at this overall proportion what I find fascinating here is the proportion of this I seems to reflect at the moment some of the major locations of Viking raiding and eventual settlement now notice you're on this map that Iceland was heavily settled by the Vikings there is an Icelandic study of the y-chromosome this is the paper that I'm referring to and the number of Iceland ders today who have this group I ancestry is 38% the last group I want to look at is the Russian settlement excuse me there's two more groups gonna look at one is Danish the other one is Russian notice that the Danes are part of the Viking homeland Scandinavian homeland there's there is a Danish study that includes y-chromosome data and they have a whopping 47% I ancestry so it is much higher in Northern Europe and especially the historical Scandinavian homelands of the Vikings compared to southern Europe so that is a very intriguing correlation here's now I want to bring in the Russians this other study we have to go to this one because it's a much heavier emphasis study Eastern Europe versus Western Europe will ignore all these other colors just the yellow ones there is a group I in this particular study and on average these Eastern Europeans have this group I lineage at a rate of 16 percent remember of course Eastern Europe is where you have subsequent later and heavy Central Asian migrations so it's higher in northern and eastern europe versus southern europe which again seems to match checks the boxes of the geography of the viking realm and its rating which is also very intriguing but we're still left with a question i've made these circles their sizes to reflect the relative proportions but you'll notice in terms of absolute values none of these circles none of these percentages exceeds 50% so I've drawn these massive circles and yet it's still a minority of the lineages all across Europe why is that why is this ancestry so low why is Europe and by extension the Americas still so dominated by the essential Asian lineages well let's think about the history of European population growth the history of population growth and decline on the European continent again it's got this hockey stick shape which is fairly flat or gradual growth for a couple thousand years that it starts to go upward that drops and then it has this massive shooting upward in the last few hundred years I want to draw our attention to that brief downturn the the point where it starts going up is 1,300 that Navy earth at the bottom of it is 1400 1300s is when the black death strikes and decimates europe by some estimates 25 to 25 percent to 1/3 of europe died out in the Black Death what does this have to do with the Vikings where does the Black Death come from Central Asia that's the origin of this plague well 1300s mid 1300 is when it's ravaging Europe 1200s is the mongol conquests and prior to that we've seen in previous episodes the Magyars the oghuz turks and some of these other Central Asian groups are prior to the Mongols so I would argue prior to the Black Death we already have the ancestors the the major groups that I'm calling the the r1 b and r1 a lineages present in Europe you up to see episode 10 for a discussion of r1b and some of the prior episodes for r1 a or I talked about r1 a likely being the signature of the Mongol conquest r1 be likely coming from the Magyars or one of these other Central Asian groups my point is you have people of Central Asian descent already present in Europe before the Black Death strikes what we've seen today is you also have a good candidate for Viking descent if not more than that Germanic tribes and so forth the Goths and the Vikings might share at a common heritage all these groups are present prior to the striking of the Black Death well in comes and in marches the Black Death from Central Asia and wipes out a third of Europe let's ask the question does it wipe out people's equally when the Black Death ravages Europe does it strike every person indiscriminately or could there be some built-in resistance to this depending on who your ancestors were we've talked about in previous episodes the lack of Native American resistance to European diseases and that being a major factor in the decimation of these peoples after the arrival of Columbus could something similar have played out just a century or two prior in Europe so what I'm suggesting that we consider is if you're in Europe and you're in the r1b or r1 lay a lineage somehow you in your family tree you've got the essential agent and testers could that have contributed somehow the measure of immunological resistance or survival or somehow inability to make it through the Black Death whereas if you're of an indigenous European lineage no genetic contribution from Central Asia could you have been selectively decimated by this particular epidemic so that by the 1800s when people start moving and mass to the Americas they're moving in these sorts of proportions heavily are one Bay r1b some are one a less so this a lineage indigenous European lineage is this the reason why these Central Asian origin lineages are so dominant in Europe and by extension in the Americas today is it because the Black Death is this low percentage of I group I ancestry an echo of the immunological history of Europe and the arrival of the Black Death is this depiction we've seen earlier of the various percentages in these groups is this our chance of being of Viking ancestry the clues we have so far all seem to point this direction so next time and in future episodes we'll discuss more of history of Europe and try to go back to the earliest stages this is the new history of the human race and there's so much more to discuss this gives us a flavor as we've been working from the present backwards in time and seeing how the general rule of thumb that's emerging is last Empire tends to win Vikings are an earlier Empire later empires come in and tend to out-compete them this is a rule of thumb we're gonna see not just in this episode but in future ones going forward well really fascinating Nathanael so hey by the way how tall are you about 5 foot 11 not not not necessarily Swedish tall and more German French ancestry but 511 ish so I'm 6 foot and I have at a six foot three and Paul so that would mean we must have closer Viking ancestry right that could very well be true yes so this would extend including to Australia because they have a European influence there as well we did we didn't discuss that I don't have data on hand that present to know the proportion of I ancestry in Australia but my guess is it's gonna be very similar to what we see in the Americas and in Europe yeah I felt you know discriminated against because you sort of ignored Australia talking about the Vikings it was unintentional oh okay all right so the one tomorrow night on the Jews tell us what you're going to do there just to give a little tease what we're gonna see is the history of the Jews and of the Middle East in general is going to again be a question of Last Man Standing there have been many reports that have come out suggesting there is a Jewish lineage and that's the question we want to explore can we go back to Moses and Aaron and some of the King David there's a long biblical history here is there an echo in the DNA of peoples today we of course have the question of the genetic relationship between Jews and to this day their long-standing enemies and the least Arabs Arabs would trace their ancestry back through Ishmael is there a evidence for this blood connection in genetics is there more recent connections these are these are some of the very large massive questions that revolve around the Jews that we want to use genetics to address so no controversy at all that we're going to discuss tomorrow night well I can see that episode 18 can we identify the Jews genetically that'll be the next episode episode 18 tomorrow night well okay we look forward to that thank you dr. Jensen thank you

Channel: Answers in Genesis

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Id: exoutIvF6wU

Length: 31min 15sec (1875 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020