Viking women were most certainly not stay-at-home moms

The traditional picture of Vikings is one of boatloads of hairy men pillaging their way along the coasts of Europe. Though true to some degree, this stereotype has more recently been tempered with the appreciation of Vikings as explorers and settlers, founding colonies from the Black Sea to Canada.

Left out of this picture are Viking women, but with the results of state-of-the-art DNA sequencing techniques, geneticists from Norway and Sweden have provided a picture of the Viking world that reveals women traveled to settle in far-off places. This appears to be true of born-and-bred Norsewomen as well as those from the lands where vikings traveled.

Handed down the maternal line

The study, published by the Royal Society, sequenced DNA from 45 Viking-age skeletons. This was mitochondrial or mtDNA which, unlike most DNA, is passed down from mother to child with no input from the father. Unless there's a mutation, children have identical mtDNA to their mothers, their mother’s mothers, and so on. If you go back far enough, every person who has ever lived falls somewhere on a single, branching, maternal family tree.