Vikings sailed out of Scandinavia. But people moving into Scandinavia also helped shape its Viking Age population.

A study of 1,556 ancient genomes traces a story of movement in both directions across early medieval Europe.

First came expansions south. In present-day Poland, sampled people associated with the Wielbark culture, around AD 1–500, require more than 75% ancestry related to early Iron Age Scandinavia in the study's models. Several are close to 100%. These are estimates for sampled burials, not everyone living in Poland; cremation leaves many people invisible to ancient-DNA studies.

Even Roman York had a man, dated to around AD 100–400, with about 25% Scandinavian-related ancestry—centuries before Viking raids. Whether he was a soldier or gladiator remains uncertain.

Farther south, incoming and local ancestries mixed. Later medieval Poland shows another major transformation, rather than simple continuity from the sampled Wielbark groups.

Then Scandinavia changed too. By around AD 800, ancestry related to central European groups appears in Denmark. During the Viking Age, it is detected in 25 of 53 sampled people from Denmark, 20 of 62 from Sweden, and just 2 of 24 from Norway. Those are counts of people with a detectable signal, NOT average ancestry percentages.

On Öland, five people whose models assign all ancestry to continental-related sources have tooth chemistry consistent with growing up locally. The genetic change had become part of local communities.

The references are ancient genetic comparisons, not literal nationalities, and DNA cannot establish a person's language or prove a “Viking” identity. The exact origins and routes of the incoming ancestry remain uncertain.

📚 Source: Speidel et al. (2025), Nature
High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe

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