Nature Podcast: 北欧海盗在欧洲的足迹
又到了每周一次的 Nature Podcast 时间了！欢迎收听本周由Benjamin Thompson 和 Dan Fox 带来的一周科学故事，本期播客片段里讨论了维京人在欧洲大陆的分布。欢迎前往iTunes或你喜欢的其他播客平台下载完整版，随时随地收听一周科研新鲜事。
音频文本：
Host: Benjamin Thompson
First up on the show, we're heading back in time over 1000 years to when the Vikings ruled the waves here in Europe. This week in Nature, a team of researchers have been using modern genomic techniques to work out who these intrepid explorers were and how they left their footprint across Europe and the North Atlantic. Reporter Dan Fox is here to tell us more.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
Vikings hold a particular grip on our popular culture. Films, comic books, operas and pop songs have all been written about these ancient blond-haired barbarian raiders. Now, most of what I just said is based more on Marvel comics rather than historical fact. But what do we actually know about who the Vikings were? Broadly speaking, the Viking Age is defined as the 300 years from about 750 to 1050 AD, and the Vikings themselves as the people living in or moving out of Scandinavia at that time.
Interviewee: Cat Jarman
That is how we usually define it, by these people who move out and migrate. But actually, there's quite a lot more to it. There's a lot more interaction, people going back and forth, a lot of people coming back into Scandinavia as well, and that's what makes the picture a bit more complicated or difficult to say what a Viking really is.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
This is Cat Jarman, an archaeologist specialising in Viking history. Given that it's even hard to define exactly what a Viking is, I asked her what we do know about the Viking Age.
Interviewee: Cat Jarman
So, we know that there's a lot of movement going out of Scandinavia in this time period, and we see this in a lot of the archaeological materials. Part of the problem we have is that we don't really know that much about the actual people involved, in terms of how many are physically moving out of Scandinavia. We don't know how many of these objects, grave goods, towns, settlements are actually founded by people and how many are a result of just more sort of cultural diffusion, I guess. So, the question is really, what are the actual people doing in this time period? What's the population is looking like? Where are they going? What are the sort of finer structures within that?
Interviewer: Dan Fox
So how much did the Vikings move around? Well, a paper published this week in Nature may have some answers. Martin Sikora is one of the authors, and he explained to me how he and his colleagues trying to answer this question using ancient DNA taken from archaeological specimens.
Interviewee: Martin Sikora
In a way, it's quite similar to modern genetic studies that look at population diversity and try to investigate differences and similarities between populations. The only difference is that we do this back in time.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
Martin and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the Viking Age and how Vikings themselves moved around.
Interviewee: Martin Sikora
So, we find that the individuals from Norway mostly went to the North Atlantic, so we find Norwegian-like ancestry in Orkney, in the Faroe Islands, in Iceland and in Greenland and, to a large extent, in Ireland. We find Danish ancestry is very present in England, which is also, of course, in line with the historical records. And Swedish-like ancestry is very much present in eastern Europe, so across the Baltic Sea, in the Baltic area and also in Poland and Russia where we do have samples from.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
For Cat, this study was particularly interesting, as it illustrated not only where the Vikings spread to, but they came from.
Interviewee: Cat Jarman
For me, I think the most important thing is actually looking at some of the dynamics of going inwards to Scandinavia. So, they have, for example, pointed out that there are people moving from southern Europe into Scandinavia in this time period, which is something that we've not really had a lot of evidence for before. There's a lot of objects going in the sorts of things being traded. But actually, to have some evidence of people moving north, and from southern Europe especially, is really, really exciting.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
Martin's work is also hinting at the extent of a cultural influence the Vikings had at the time.
Interviewee: Cat Jarman
They've got individuals as well with Pictish ancestry from the Orkney Islands who are buried with what we would typically define as sort of Viking or Scandinavian artefacts, but actually who have got quite a different ancestry and genetic history. And that sort of thing, for me as an archaeologist, is very exciting because it's adding to something that we can't find from the typical archaeological record.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
Despite her excitement, Cat does worry that the paper may over-generalise in some of its conclusions.
Interviewee: Cat Jarman
They are trying to make some generalisations over a very long time period, so several hundred years and a very, very large geographical region. They aren't able to break anything down chronologically, which is a bit of an issue because you can't necessarily assume that what happens right at the start of the Viking Age corresponds to what happens in 1050 or after the turn of the millennium, and I think that is simplifying things a bit too much in a way that isn't very helpful.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
Martin, however, thinks that geographically, the sample is representative. Where he would most like to have more data is from the preceding Iron Age.
Interviewee: Martin Sikora
There is just not that much data yet available across Europe from the Iron Age to be able to say conclusively what changes happened before from the Iron Age to the Viking Age in those different regions. We have some in our dataset, and we already see some interesting patterns but in order to confirm that or more thoroughly test it, we would need some more sampling from the preceding time period.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
While Martin would like to expand the dataset, Cat thinks the next steps should be to drill deeper into some of the examples highlighted in this paper.
Interviewee: Cat Jarman
I think there's an awful lot to unpack from this study, and there's a lot of data there that's really, really exciting. I think what needs to be done now is actually to look at each of these case studies in detail, combine it with all the other evidence, which is something, obviously, they haven't been able to do yet. So, I think once we take this evidence and break it down, look at things like gender, they haven't looked at, and again, also chronological patterns, that's, I think, when we get something really, really important and significant about the Viking Age. So, I feel like this is a really hugely exciting starting point of data, but now there's a real working thing of trying to then put it into more context.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
For now, though, our next steps may be to put some old Viking stereotypes to bed.
Interviewer: Dan Fox
It's not that we find that the Vikings were these very, very tight-knit communities in most places where it's only very, very homogeneous Scandinavian ancestry and like the blond, blue-eyed warriors, but actually in many places there's a large amount of diversity and there is a lot of influx from different regions. So, I think it goes in line with what we have learned about human population history also from other ancient DNA studies. I think that the past was just much more dynamic than we might have appreciated before.
Host: Nick Howe
That was Martin Sikora from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. You also heard from Cat Jarman from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. You can find a link to Martin's paper in today's show notes.
《自然》论文：
Population genomics of the Viking world