Re: American Indians skin tone and the Vikings
Bearcat (bcat@netcom.com)
Sat, 30 Sep 1995 16:51:09 GMT
Grant Hughes (grant.hughes@bio.uio.no) wrote:
: This is an interesting thread indeed. I have only encountered limited
: references to pre-Columbian genetic influence on Native American
: populations.
: I remember reading of early (supposed initial contacts) with groups
: such as the Mandan who had members with "European" features, i.e.
: light eyes, fair hair and paler skin. There have also been attempts
: to correlate certain Indiginous words to Old Norse. I remember the
: specific title of "The Norse-Mandan Dictionary" (rather provocative).
: Some have claimed the well-known Mandan rites of passage to have stemmed from
: emulation of the Crucifiction. If this is the case, it certainly did
: not come from the colonies (not disputed) of the Vikings who were then
: still pagans.
: Any cultural or genetic contribution by pre-Columbian Europeans, however,
: can be assumed to be minimal.
: Does anyone have some concrete sources?
cavalli-sforza, et al, _history and geography of human genes_,
princeton U press, 1994, p.308:
The eastern coast of Greenland was settled by Vikings
coming from Norway and Iceland in the ninth or tenth
century A.D., but the Viking settlement lost contact with
Europe and disappeared in the fifteenth century. Perhaps in
that early time, and probably later after the Danes settled
in Greenland (beginning in A.D. 1721), ther was some degree
of admixture with people of European origin.
----
admittedly, this is not a very strong endorsement. "perhaps"
doesn't strike me as very definitive.
- bearcat
|