Ancient DNA reveals the truth about Vikings - BBC REEL 

As a person of 100 % Norwegian background, I find this program fascinating. My great grandfather Kolnes whose picture I have looks like a Viking from a picture book. His name was Enoch and he received a medal from the king of Norway for saving the lives of a shipwreck in the Stavanger area by rowing his rowboat into the north sea and saving people from shipwreck on the rocks.

I find listening to Eske Willerslev’s Danish accent more fascinating than his conclusions.

That man has the most Danish accent ever.

There are currently plenty of norwegians a swedes who are not typically blonde, yet their facial features are distinctly belonging to their countries. Sure, blondes are more common in nordoc vountries than elsewhere but Scandinavians are no where near exclusively blonde. Norwegians especially have all sorts of spectacularly "tall, dark and handsome" types and a fascinating array of deep dark blue eyes instead of conventional greyblues or clears. In fact you'll probably find more "typical" blonds in westrussians than in Norwegians. There are just a lot of assumptions anout what scandinavians look like.

Imagine being a proud warrior, tough as hell and fight with no fear and end up in someone's office as a paperweight

I wouldn't call adding Anglo-Saxons and Celtic peoples to the warband very diverse. The genetic distance between the British isles and Scandinavia is tiny.

Showing a nineteenth century sail ship makes no sense in talking about Vikings 500 years earlier

I don't think I've ever seen someone work so hard at speaking as Prof. Willerslev.

Interestingly, when Thor Heyerdahl visited Azerbaijan and Caucasian region, he was shown the ancient petroglyphs (Gobustan) of boats on the western shore of Caspian Sea, strikingly resembling the Vikings’ ones. He also met people there with blues eyes and pale skin (living in mountains of Azerbaijan) , which have legends of their ancestors sailing with these boats to the North. But Norwegian historical science never accepted Thor’s hypothesis of migration from Caspian to the North along Volga river and further. It died out. Hopefully, someone starts his work again.

That guy learned English watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies😂

Sounds like being a viking was more a job than some kind of ethnic identity.

I recently had a DNA test, and I found that Danish and Scandinavian genes were still present in my ancestry from my father, who came from Yorkshire!

So, Viking was a lifestyle like say being a pirate. A mix of whatever culture that newcomers brought with them.

Correction: "Vikings are often thought of as murderous, thieving rapists who destroyed anything that they couldn't understand, which was mostly everything. In fact, they were a complete cultural vacuum." Isn't that a more accurate description of what most people think?

I note that there was very little mention of Scotland, for some unknown reason. The Vikings in Scotland were from Norway and they ruled the north of Scotland, the Northern Isles (Orkneys and Shetland) as well as the Western Isles (the Hebrides). Those areas were all part of the Norwegian kingdom. Norwegian genes are a larger part of Scottish DNA than Danish DNA is in English DNA.

If the BBC told me it was raining outside I'd have to go and take a look.

No races are ‘pure’ but they’re still a race but trust BBC to create a narrative in which they can say ‘diverse’ over and over

In the early 90s I spent 2 years in Pamir, Karakorum and Hindu kush mountains. In some of the most remote and isolate valleys I've met indigenous people with blond hair and blue eyes, we know that the Azores in the middle Atlantic ocean was inhabited 2000 bc so imo no doubt of the indo-european migration theory and much more frequent contacts than previous thought between ancient peoples. These people were more capable travelling long distances across land and sea than anyone believe.

Me, a Norwegian: Why does that guy sound like he is being strangled? Yikes! Oh, hold on, he's just Danish....

Perhaps the most important fact about the Vikings is that they were mostly farmers and fishermen who went to Viking in the offseason.

Viking was a profession more than an ethnicity - But still only a Norse profession. The Vikings that went to conquer England never actually called themselves "Vikings" but only referred to them as "The Danes" because they were from Denmark. Viking raiders were Scandinavian. It's not like there were Southern European or African Viking hordes, nor were there brown or black people among them. But dark hair and dark eyes was very normal like we see in Scandinavia today. Blue eyes and blond hair was more apparent than in other places in the world, but never dominant. That is only Hollywood fiction. Long before the Viking age, Scandinavia had DNA from many places which makes up the Norse gene pool in present time. So the "diversity" they talk about here is nothing special and shouldn't be news, nor is it what they make it out to be. It's basic probability theory that no European race is 100 percent pure. White people come from somewhere else like anybody - They didn't grow from trees lol

My brother did a test called the BigY that only men can take that will reveal the dna from the paternal lines a lone. Prior to this test, earlier tests revealed that he carried a mutant gene that has been found in the Scottish Highlander Kings. They were fraternizing with the Vikings long, long before England. Our ancestry is now included in this specialized research and study along with thousands of others. They found that my great grandmother was of Viking heritage.

My DNA showed me being from the ancient aliens.

The trouble is, in these days terms like The Dark Ages have been re-defined, in order to be more historically correct and accurate to the period. So the Dark Ages are now the "Early Medieval Period", AD and BC have now been re-defined as BCE (Before the Current Era). And yet, all the historians have not yet got to grips with the fact that the term "Vikings" is not only (largely) a more modern term, but is a completely un-defined term, which can include various different peoples in various different activities (or not, depending on the commentator), with no strict definition to categorise them. So working out "The Truth About the Vikings" is like trying to find out where all the slaves came from, in history, and what their ethnicity was. Define what "Vikings" means FIRST, then you can work out where those defined groups or individuals originated. Otherwise, taking a small sample of individuals from a certain place in time and history, establishing their origin, then claiming that you know where all the "Vikings" came from is nonsensical. Because how do you know if they were Vikings or not, and how do you know if that small sample is true of all the "Vikings"? You can't know, unless you define what "Vikings" were.

I remember watching an episode of History's Mysteries on The History Channel (back when they still did history) the last scholar on the show remarked about how diverse the Vikings were through their travels and he said: "If you want to know what a Viking looked like, look in a mirror."

"Vikings are often thought of as 'pure-bred' "not sure where you guys come up with this kind of assumption, however blonde people were very rare and relatively speaking they were more common in the north same as gingers. By the way in all popular depictions they are show to interact a lot with many cultures, as expected if you travel the world in your little boat. Had to watch it to the end, science mixed with politics....

I fully expected “We wuz kangz and sheeit, we wuz Beethoven we wuz Vikings”

I'm not gonna pretend like I have a clue about what real viking scandinavian culture was actually like, but there was nothing presented here that drastically changes the outlook or necessarily supports the conclusions shared.

Just wanna add, because I find it interesting, but 'Viking' comes from the Danish Vik, meaning bay or inlet of water. So Viking/ Baying would be an active action of travelling from bay to bay or town to town. Wic could also refer to a settlement, harbour or village from the Latin Vicus, York, was referred to as Eoferwic, Berwick is still called Berwick, Norwich, Ipswich, Dunwich etc. So 'Vikings' were anyone in northern Europe and beyond who actively travelled from town to town for whatever pragmatic purpose, trading or pillaging.

It would be useful if the BBC linked to the research. I did a search on Google scholar and cannot find relevant articles by Eske Willesley or Martin Sikora, so it is impossible to assess their claims or the BBC's interpretation of them. I know David Reich argues that European populations are made up primarily of hunter-gatherers, farmers from Anatolia, and the Yamnaya from the Steppe. I would expect Viking DNA to reflect that, but who knows if we can't read the research discussed in this package?

100% thought the BBC was going to say they were black!

The Vikings have left their legacy in Britain as place names eg Derby,Grimsby and Rugby as by means farm,Thorpe,Thwaite surnames as in Jarvis,Anderson and Earle originally Jarl for example the Viking settlers not been fully assimulated till the 12th century.

Perhaps the reverse is true. Gentics elements that are found outside Scandinavia and anong Vikings originated in Scandinavia first. Far more Vikings for example settled in Sicily and Anatolia than the reverse.

I did read the study and the diversity here is very much exaggerated.

I remember my grandmother saying I don t care what they tell you in school Ragnar Lothbrok was black.

Makes sense. It's similar to the Sea Peoples. Basically, groups of pirates. Hence the strong connection between vikings and slaving. Meanwhile most Scandinavians stayed home and farmed.

The Vikings also lived on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea on the Polish side, the daughter of Mieszko I Świętosław (Sygryda Storrada born in 968) was the wife of the Vikings king Eric the Victorious (1 son), second husband Swen Widłobrody. She had 2 sons with him, Harald (King of Denmark) and Cnut the Great, one invaded England and the other stayed on the throne after his father. The language and runic writing of the Vikings / Etruscan is a Slavic language, the so-called runes Polish researcher, archaeologist Tadeusz Wolański 1785-1865 read inscriptions on Etruscan monuments. After writing the book, he received the protection of the tsar - a battalion of the Russian army (Poland was under partition), who did not leave him a single step so that he would not die for reading Etruscan inscriptions.

Outside of traders and royalty, isolated groups tended to have isolated dna and most of these dna studies that reveal "diverse" dna tend to be of Scandinavians at foreign trade centres or cherry picked examples

I dabble in linguistics. I find it hugely interesting that when Danes speak English, the cadence and rhythm of their speech reminds me very strongly of Yorkshire, Northumbrian and even Liverpool English. There’s something about it. Once you notice it, you can’t unhear it. It’s fascinated when you stop and think that there were a lot of danish people that settled there in the late first millennium. Clearly, their language left its mark on the English spoken there.

Altogether now, “Genetics and culture are not the same thing”. This should be the headline of nearly all such studies. Europe, or even just the U.K., is replete with examples of invaders adapting to local cultures and assimilating, locals adopting the culture of the new overlords who killed off their aristocracy, cultures blending to produce hybrids etc - and all of that being overlaid onto changes - if rather less dramatic changes - in the underlying genetic composition of the population. One of the best examples - and relevant to this piece - is what happened to the Norse who colonised and dominated the islands and seas of western Scotland, coastal Ireland and Scotland and the Irish Sea for several centuries. They became the “Norse-Gaels” a hybrid culture. Norse disappeared. The last ruler of the whole territory, in the 12th c, was Somerled “Lord of the Isles”. His sons divided it between them and their descendants became some of the most powerful and numerous of Scotland’s clans - who thought of themselves as Gaels and who retrospectively claimed Somerled as a Gaelic hero who resisted the Vikings. But the echo of the Vikings is still there - From Wikipedia: “Since the early 2000s, several genetic studies have been conducted on men bearing surnames traditionally associated with patrilineal descendants of Somerled. The results of one such study, published in 2004, revealed that five chiefs of Clan Donald, who all traced their patrilineal descent from Somerled, were indeed descended from a common ancestor.[165][note 20] Further testing of men bearing the surnames MacAlister, MacDonald, and MacDougall, found that, of a small sample group, 40% of MacAlisters, 30% of MacDougalls, and 18% of MacDonalds shared this genetic marker.[166] These percentages suggest that Somerled may have almost 500,000 living patrilineal descendants.[167][note 21] The results of a later study, published in 2011, revealed that, of a sample of 164 men bearing the surname MacDonald, 23% carried the same marker borne by the clan chiefs. This marker was identified as a subgroup of haplogroup R1a,[170] known to be extremely rare in Celtic-speaking areas of Scotland, but very common in Norway.[171] Both genetic studies concluded that Somerled's patrilineal ancestors originated in Scandinavia.[172]”

It would be interesting to know which social status the "sequenced" people had. If nobles, commoners, "imported" slaves etc. were all put into one basket, diversity can be expected to be high.

Talking about someone's genetics and not mentioning a haplogroup is stupidity or evil intent.

Why is it that the Europeans are the only ones having their identity confused? You never hear about the Nubians claiming to be white.

Yeah, the Scandinavians spread across the world and married people of other cultures, above all the British isles, today's Russia, etc. That's been known for a long time. It doesn't mean that the Scandinavians were a recently "mixed" people. The population was mixed in the sense of it being a product of Yamnaya peoples who invaded Scandinavia and the neolithic farmers. Norway and Denmark has a majority distribution of R Y-DNA whereas Sweden has majority I, former being Yamnaya, latter being neolithic farmers. These people in the program want to make it seem as though Scandinavians were comprised of Afghans, Africans, Mediterraneans, which is just not the case.

Funny I have never seen a BBC report on the genetic purity of the Zulus. I wonder if they have an ulterior agenda...

Why would you be surprised, they were a slave keeping culture, they invented the word “slave” every slave culture breeds with their slaves, even the Spartans.

Woke at second degree. Vikings were from Africa and Afghanistan, right?

There is no doubt that Scandinavian Vikings were taller and blonder than the others. However, those who settled abroad married local girls for the average man and local princesses for their chiefs. The interest of local lords was to tie friendly relationships with these rich traders. That means that the Vikings born overseas were very often only "half Scandinavian". Even the chiefs and second generation may have been only a quarter Scandinavian. On the continent, the Vikings opened their ranks to any volonteer wishing to get rid of the Franks. People from Saxony, Frisia, Bretagne and Aquitaine joined Viking troops to fight the Franks. This is the reason why they were so efficient. Their scouts and spies were locals.

We know what what the Vikings looked like because their little-changed descendants are still with us today. "It's not ethnicity that determines whether you're a Viking or not, it's a lifestyle." In other words if we redefine the word Viking to mean anything we want it to mean, then the Vikings weren't Northern Europeans. A bit like saying because people around the world (unfortunately) wear American logos on their clothes and adapt many American fads they're American citizens. Defining a people's history out of existence in service to eventually putting them out of existence.

Their most astounding finding was that several of the Vikings had been fathered by Simon Watson.

What passes for "real science" is worthy of debate and skepticism in this day and age.

So randomly Nordic people became blonde in the last 200 years since picture records started!? This is surely a joke

After doing a DNA test. I am 6th generation Australian. It came back I had genes mainly from Ireland. No surprise as my grandmother was born there. But also some from Norway.

I am of Norwegian descent born and raised in Seattle Washington around a bunch of other people of Norwegian descent and I have never heard anybody talk about Vikings as a race or being pure

Of course. Vikings were all black with browns eyes and now Scandinavians are white with blue eyes.

Very interesting! But what I find equally fascinating is that Vikings, like Pirates, have been glorified. As the video says at the very beginning, they sailed the seas plundering coastal towns.

I think research like this skipped the social system like it was back than. Slaves, vikings, lords, nobles, kings. If you don't know whether you're sampling any of these, or even worse, perhaps viking burials of those they'd slain, you cannot come to such strong conclusions. The logical reason the diversity decreased in the scandinavian region is because the import of slaves and wives, stopped at some point. You cannot conclude anything without knowing the social status of the ones you've sampled. This does sound like a (weak) attempt to justify mass migration, something the EU seems to love (and why there was money available for such a weak but costly project).

Big hand to those musicians playing ancient instruments in traditional garb. This takes so much love, discipline, and commitment. Rare traits by today's standards.

BBC keeps muddling the water by saying that Vikings were not homogeneous. Of course that's true where they ended up at, being southern Italy or Russia but those who didn't leave their native land were very homogeneous and surely had blond hair and blue eyes, two traits that can still be found nowadays in Scandinavia.

Fun Fact; All the Viking skeletons found buried in the battle field, were discovered smiling.

I’m from Orkney, and even though Orkney passed out of Norwegian possession into Scottish hands over 500 years ago, Orcadians still think of themselves culturally as more of a Norse-derived society. Biologically and geographically closer to Scotland, but even now, many Orcadians don’t refer to themselves as Scottish or British.

One of interesting things is our modern usage of the word viking. The people of Scandinavia were known as Norse. When they went raiding they were going vikings or going on a viking. My usage is no doubt not completely accurate. But my understanding is they used viking as a verb. Modern usage is more of a noun. If you were tough enough to join a raiding group you could go on a viking no matter your ethnicity. You could stay in Scandinavia and be simply Norse. Of course there is a lot of crossover in names and terms.

😂 The Vikings were super diverse! Most of them from Central Africa and they accepted everyone from across the world as Vikings, no matter where they were from! Amazing BBC work. Also, they never invaded coastal towns. The Coastal people, mostly from Pakistan, invited them to increase their artistic variety! If I send this script in, the BBC will have me writing for them within two weeks!

This is where the bbc takes something out of context to push a political point. They do this every time. Dr. Who is the most scientific thing on the bbc.

The Viking’s were more like a band of mercenaries and so one would expect that all kinds of people from various geographies were attracted to the mercenary life-style esp in those days and vikings were excellent sailors so I would have been surprised if there was no genetic diversity revealed in this study

In this 400 person sample, I wonder if any were actually slaves etc and not Vikings

I am an ethnic Dane. I have brown hair and unusual facial features for one. I have been asked several times where I come from. My family on both sides were common farmers in Denmark as far back as any records go and up until my parents. And they stayed in and married people in the immediate area. According to family history on my mother's side, they have been there since before the marshy land rose, which is 600-800 years ago. And yet there is this line of people in my mother's family, with brown hair and these facial features. We look very much like each other. 2-3 people in each generation. I am curious about where it comes from, but I am not convinced that DNA testing would reveal anything. Because sometimes you are just a brown-haired ethnic Dane - not all ethnic Danes are blond with blue eyes. (I did suggest to my mom that the look might come from the Polish seasonal workers in the 1800s. She vehemently denied that it could be the case. Because that would have meant that, ahem, someone believed to be the father, wasn't 🤭).

Vikings: Sail. Raid. Rape. Pillage. Enslave. Invade. Colonize. BBC: Oh look, diversity!

Further study found that basically every resident of Oslo has an ancestral line leading back to Burkino Faso innit.

I thought the first guy was making laugh of the accent, but it was really his accent

Considering the vikings brought people (non vulantary househelps) home with them after raids and probably had children with them, their genetics must have mixed t some point

Was anyone else waiting for them to tell us what all 400 or so skeletal remains were from?

In the times of the Byzantine Empire, it was common for Scandinavians to go to the Black Sea area to work as mercenary soldiers for the Byzantines. At the same time, there was possibly an arrival of "Scythians" from the steppe of what is now the northern Black Sea coast to Scandinavia, carrying burial mound culture and even the Indo-European language (the true Scandinavians possibly spoke something similar to present-day Finnish)

Let me guess it’s 2021 so let’s make them black! ✊🏿

This doesn't change our understanding of history. This provides evidence of what we've long understood to be historically accurate. In a brief and very oversimplified explanation, Scandinavians abducted a wide variety of people from many lands during the Viking age. These people largely were enslaved, as has been the rule throughout most of human history. Many of the abductors and their victims had children who shared DNA with the ancestors of both parents... I really shouldn't have to say that part, but there it is. These children, unsurprisingly, sometimes chose to emulate the lifestyle of the conqueror rather than the conquered. It doesn't prove that the people we call Vikings were a diverse and inclusive group of globally minded people so much as it reinforces the well documented fact that they preyed on, plundered, and ravaged almost indiscriminately throughout the known world, the genetically mixed offspring of which then joined the ranks and continued the tradition. A number of abductees may even have joined their kidnappers in future raids, as was commonplace with Barbary pirates, Caribbean pirates, countless invading armies and navies throughout history, etc. If you want to show shocking evidence that we've been wrong about the genetic makeup of Scandinavians during the Viking age, the way to do that is by showing evidence of large scale diversity before that age and the abductions associated with it had begun. I do understand the need to portray this as overturning our understanding though. Book sales and research funding aren't nearly as high if the claim adds up to a statement of, "Nothing new discovered. We were right all along."

My mom’s side of the family is Norwegian which I very much favor, but my dad appears very Native American. He has always been told that he was about 1/2 Native American. He wanted to have a DNA test done and low and behold his black haired, tan skinned self is 25% Scandinavian and the rest a combo of Irish, English, German, and 1.1% Western Asian. We all had a great laugh. Genetics is crazy!

come on, everybody who actually knew a bit of norse history already knew this. the vikings travelled and settled all over the place.

Kind of concerning how few people in the comments are skeptical of these conclusions and results.

I understand that you want to be able try and dilute what it means to be Scandinavian to try to include migrants from the other side of the world that has arrived in the west the past decades, but you don't have to basically lie about the conclusions. What the research actually states is that, if Scandinavian men married a woman of a different heritage, the vast, vast majority were other Europeans. The thing with blondeness i can kind-of see, since the Scandinavians valued attractive, blonde women to bring back from raids, which in turn slightly increased how common it was. We know that the Scandinavian DNA hasn't really changed much at all since the viking age, don't try to mislead people into believing anything else.

The only time I've ever heard the reference to blue-eyed blondes as any sort of 'pure-bred race' was referring to the Nazis and their Eugenics campaign. When did the Vikings get involved in this bs?

A lot of sea burials and cremations happen in Viking culture. I'd like to know where they got their samples from because it seems they have a chip on their shoulder.

This would help explain why I, of Swedish descent, ended up with the rare AB+ blood trap. This blood type requires DNA input from both Europe and Asia.

Could those genetically diverse “Vikings “ be enslaved people kidnapped from other regions?

cuz if there's one thing the BBC is good at, it's telling the truth

Anyone should know that Scandinavians were more blue eyed and blonde back then than they are today. Entropy increases with time.

The 'Vikings' were also Finnish, as a group lead by Rollo invaded and took over Normandy. South Normandy had leaders like Harold "the Dane" of Avenel - from Denmark. So the Norman conquest wasnt the French but another invasion by the Danes and the Scanda-Navy-ans. Even though we already had Danelaw.

Amazing that nobody is talking about how small that sampling is. That's really small relatively speaking. And who were they??? They're making alot out of a little. Honestly, I think it's just another attack on being "white."

I am confused when they say "Viking identity." This is an identity that moderns have made up.

There should also be a factor that the most risk-taking, the most adventurous left Scandinavia. Those left behind were the quiet types who wanted to farm.

There's no confusion about who the Vikings were. Nobody's claiming they were a monorace so I wonder where BBC gets that idea from. Northwestern Europeans are the 1st or 2nd most diverse in the world (the other is Ashkenazi Jews. Sorry I lost the source on that, so I don't know which is 1st place or 2nd place but it doesn't matter much). Proto-Germanic U106/R-L48 groups from around Friesland go up the coast around 1,700 BCE and take over, likely by invitation. From these people we get the language, Odin, boats, farming and much more. Proto-Germanic U106 groups are 5,100 years old and of that, R-L48 is about 4,700 years old. The dominant culture of Scandinavia is R-L48. R-L48 and I1 (native Scandinavians) and subsets of R1a Baltic-Slavic formed the peoples of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. From 1,700 BCE to about 500 BCE, things progressed. In the coastal areas, U106/R-L48 and I1 blended to some degree, becoming something new: Coastal North Sea Germanic Scandinavians. They built boats and ships, much, much earlier than the Viking Age. Jutes from Denmark, under Hengist, founded England in 449 CE. They even got up to Orkney at that time, all in rowed keel ships. They can't tell a first wave Angle (or Jute) apart from later wave Danish Vikings by DNA. Just becase some Vikings joined in for work, from say, Belarus, or others in Orkney were part Pictish (and part Norwegian) does not discount all we know about Viking whatsoever, it only expands and confirms what we already know, if we think accurately. To try to claim that a Celt in Britain could become 'Viking' by choosing a lifestyle... is rare and a stretch at best. While not all U106/R-L48 or I1 are Viking, it is definitely true that most Vikings were R-L48 and I1, that is overwhelmingly clear and not up for debate. Blond(e) and blues are a Baltic trait, but those traits were common long before the Viking Age and are noted as trait amongst the Vikings wherever they went: Height, strength, blonde and blues, though many had brown hair, near black hair, olive skin, sometimes green eyes, etc, blond and blues and height are, and were, 'a thing'. No debate.

My family lived for centuries on the hills of Kvarner bay, Croatia. Many related families from there, as well as us- big percentage of Scandinavian dna( Myheritage). Mytrueancestry showed same percentage of Ostrogoths. So unexpected. Matched with families in south Sweden and Denmark.

Didn't they take slaves? Why would it be assumed every skeleton was a viking??

My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were from Norway 🇳🇴 and Sweden 🇸🇪. So interesting this video is ... thank you for sharing ❤️

Fascinating! I hope we can get more DNA information and details over the next few decades.

Interesting stuff. As an Englishman with a paternal heritage from one of the most famous Scottish clans, it came as no surprise that my "English' and 'Celtic' DNA came back fairly equal - roughly 35% each. The surprise was the 20% Scandinavian (with a little bit of Finnish) and the 10% Eastern European!

DNA is wild. My sister and I are both approximately 50% Britain, Wales. But she's about a quarter swedish and Danish. I'm a quarter Norwegian.

I have always wondered if beer 🍺 followed the Vikings or if the Vikings followed beer 🍺. Apparently trade and plundering was more important 🙄 Greetings from Germany...🍺🖐

Did the "vikings" bring back genetic diversity or did they just leave their genes behind in diverse populations?

Barely any non-white people existed in Europe 75 years ago, yet you're saying that 1,500 years ago the Vikings weren't as European as Europeans are today?

Everybody knows they weren't blonde haired and blue eyed . They were black . I saw it on Vikings : Valhalla .