Scandinavian population history revealed by ancient human genomes

I have Scandinavian ancestry, and it is something that has always been highly prominent in my family traditions. When my mom recently sent me this article, I was reminded of the interesting ancient past of Scandinavia and how little we know about the region prior to the Vikings. Northern Europe was one of the last places in the Old World to be populated by humans, and also one of the last places to adopt agriculture. Until recently, few studies had looked at the path of colonization of Scandinavia and who first settled there. This study, announced in Science Daily and completed by researchers at Max Planck, analyzed aDNA of 48 individuals dated from 7500 - 500 BC and found that there were likely two routes of migration into Scandinavia, and that agriculture was likely brought to the region by immigrants rather than by cultural diffusion and contact.

See the paper published in Nature Communications here.

-Kim Foecke