This little Island in the Bristol Channel, UK is where my personal Viking odyssey really began. The Vikings took refuge on Steep Holm during the summer of 914 and then carried out raids on the coast of Somerset at Watchet and Porlock, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. At the end of the 12th century, there was a small priory of Canons Regular of St Michael on the island. Since visiting there in 2022 i've made it my lifes mission to visit as many Viking 'territories' as possible......from small beginnings come epics!

#OST #Drums #Vikings #Dark #Dance #Music #DAW

I was thinking if Greenland did join the USA it would then mean it would be an actual FACT that the Vikings did settle in the USA!? 🤪🤣

From filming Amon Amarth's Saxons and Vikings

https://jorvikvikingfestival.co.uk/

THE LONE VIKING AT STAMFORD BRIDGE (NORSE) The lone Viking was an unnamed berserker warrior who is remembered in the Viking sagas for his impressive last stand at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, between the Norwegian Vikings led by Harald Hardrada and the English army of Harold Godwinson. Taking place during the Viking invasion of England, Harald and his vikings were suddenly attacked by a large army led by Harold in an effort to free York from the occupation of the Vikings. Left unarmed and unprepared, Harald tried to regroup his surprised army and retreat back to form a defensive line. As they fall back, the only barrier standing between the English and the unprepared Vikings was a small wooden bridge. Unfortunately for the English, Harald sent his berserker to guard that bridge and buy Harald time to arm and ready his army. Filled with bloodlust by drinking his potion and praying to Odin, the berserker took on the whole English army only by himself (which numbered 15,000). The English charged the Viking to gain access to Harald Hadrada, but the berserker killed many of them with his great axe and sword. He held the bridge for a considerable amount of time, and killed over 40 English soldier single-handedly. The berserker however, finally succumbed to the English when a soldier rowed to the bottom of the bridge, and stabbed the viking in the groin, mortally wounding him. The Vikings were soon defeated when the English poured into their position. His sacrifice was in vain, as Harald Hadrada and many of his vikings were soon slain afterwards, marking the end of the Viking Age. https://hubpages.com/education/The-Lone-Viking-Warrior-on-Stamford-Bridge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stamford_Bridge

More info about the Dna article 'Norse Code' in Natue magazine. Prof Alice Roberts's (edited due to length) social media post: "My friend Pontus Skoglund and his colleagues have JUST published this incredible new piece of research into Viking-era migrations - using ancient DNA and a brand analysis called Twigstats. [......] This new analysis includes a new piece of information relating to [.....] the remains of 30+ individuals from a mass grave in Oxford, thought to have been slaughtered in the 1002 St Brice’s Day Massacre, [......]. Ancient DNA analysis is an incredibly powerful tool for understanding populations, migrations and families [.....]. This is really exciting science. And it’s really hard. First the archaeogeneticists have to take samples from ancient bones, then they extract DNA from the samples [......]. Ancient DNA might survive the ravages of time - but it’s usually broken up into tiny pieces, [......]. So the next stage is assembling those segments of code into a whole genome. It’s a mindblowingly huge puzzle which is only made possible with advances in computing power. But reconstructing an ancient genome is just the beginning. What the archaeogeneticists are really interested in is comparing lots of genomes - looking for similarities and differences. These are the key to understanding what was happening to populations in the past - and tracking migrations. Over time, genomes acquire new mutations. Those mutations will be inherited by descendants of the person in whom the mutation first arose. While most of the genome will be identical between two people, the pattern of these little differences is crucial for working out what happened to populations over time - and for tracking families. [.......]. Pontus told me that distinguishing different Iron Age Scandinavian groups, for instance, is MUCH harder. It’s not a perfect analogy, but imagine trying to tell if someone is Norwegian or Danish by the appearance - it’s hard. But Twigstats works by focusing on salient differences - and these are ones related to relatively recent mutations [......]. It ignores older mutations which have been sifted and sorted through populations over time, creating confusing ‘noise’. So it’s a bit like snipping a twig off a gene tree so you can focus on just those branches - ignoring the rest of the tree. Hence the name: Twigstats. This means you can now spot subtle but important differences between populations that are quite genetically similar. And then this also means you can spot when in time a population starts to look more similar to another one - implying that those populations have merged with each other. In other words: some people have migrated and settled in a new place and started to mix with the population already there. Pontus and his colleagues tested their new technique on simulated data to make sure it worked - which it did, very well. Ten times better than anything else they’d tried before. They used it to look at some real samples, looking at modern human and Neanderthal DNA - to test a criticism of the theory that these species interbred with each other in the Palaeolithic. Now this is something I’ve been following for years, ever since my first big landmark series for the BBC, The Incredible Human Journey. Back then, in 2008, there didn’t seem to be any evidence of modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals mixing. At least, fossil bones weren’t providing a suggestion of interbreeding. But then ancient DNA came along - with the first Neanderthal genome published in 2010. And then it seemed there was evidence for interbreeding, around 60,000 years ago. But a few scientists have criticised this claim, saying that the patterns in the modern human DNA could have happened another way, just through genetic variants being sorted over time, creating a sort of mirage of an interbreeding event with Neanderthals. Most archaeogeneticists still thought that interbreeding explained the pattern. But there was an element of doubt. [....] Twigstats finally puts that doubt to bed. Neanderthals and modern humans definitely met up and swapped genes with each other (delicately put). [.......] The main focus of the study was the later first millennium - the Viking Age. And here, Pontus and his colleagues were able to use Twigstats to track migrations of different populations that have been difficult to ‘see’ before, they’re all so similar. They found evidence for migrations of Germanic people southward into Poland and Slovakia, as well as into south-central Europe and Britain. And then later, those people that ended up in Poland were themselves replaced during the Slavic period. They also found evidence of a previously unknown migration into Scandinavia, before the Viking Age - transforming the ancestry of Denmark and southern Sweden. Interestingly, this seems to coincide with a change in runic script and language - establishing Old Norse and the Younger Futhark."

A new DNA research. High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe. Many known and unknown historical events have remained below detection thresholds of genetic studies because subtle ancestry changes are challenging to reconstruct. Methods based on shared haplotypes1,2 and rare variants3,4 improve power but are not explicitly temporal and have not been possible to adopt in unbiased ancestry models. Here we develop Twigstats, an approach of time-stratified ancestry analysis that can improve statistical power by an order of magnitude by focusing on coalescences in recent times, while remaining unbiased by population-specific drift. We apply this framework to 1,556 available ancient whole genomes from Europe in the historical period. We are able to model individual-level ancestry using preceding genomes to provide high resolution. During the first half of the first millennium ce, we observe at least two different streams of Scandinavian-related ancestry expanding across western, central and eastern Europe. By contrast, during the second half of the first millennium ce, ancestry patterns suggest the regional disappearance or substantial admixture of these ancestries. In Scandinavia, we document a major ancestry influx by approximately 800 ce, when a large proportion of Viking Age individuals carried ancestry from groups related to central Europe not seen in individuals from the early Iron Age. Our findings suggest that time-stratified ancestry analysis can provide a higher-resolution lens for genetic history. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08275-2

Norse code. The use of genetic ancestry to trace history and probe events of the past is challenging because ancestries in many locations are relatively similar, making it hard to distinguish groups and populations. In January edition of Nature Magazine, The researchers use a new technique to examine the genomic history of early medieval Europe. This allowed them to track the expansion of two streams of Scandinavian-related ancestry across the continent, as well a later stream of ancestry expanding into Scandinavia before the Viking Age (around 750–1050). The cover is inspired by the serpentine carvings found on Viking Age runestones and features the Elder Futhark runes for the DNA nucleotides A, T, G and C (K). — show less Cover image: Art by Oliver Uberti. (Stone texture: © Olga Yastremska, New Africa, Africa Studio/Adobe Stock)

#Rune #OST #Dark #Drums #Vikings #Demo #Lyre #Reverb #Pad