vikings

There’s new evidence that Vikings landed in North America long before Columbus. First, Texas engineer Richard Nielsen, who has spent 17 years studying the controversial Runestone, says it’s definitely a genuine Viking artifact. And Lauren Taylor writes in the May issue of Fate Magazine that Maine Coon Cats are related to the feisty casts brought by the Vikings to the Americas.

Joe Albert of echopress.com quotes Runestone Museum director LuAnn Patton as saying, “Basically, he has found documentation showing that every rune and word on the Runestone can be found in 14th century documents.” She’s talking about newly-discovered early Scandinavian documents, or land deeds, that show the same kind of writing as on the Runestone.
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Blood tests taken over the past year show that part of northwest England is still a Viking stronghold, just as it was 1,200 years ago. Geneticists have discovered clear evidence of Norwegian genetic influences in the area. The study also confirms that Vikings settled in large numbers in the Shetland and Orkneys and the far north of the Scottish mainland.

In the first large-scale genetics survey of its kind, led by Professor David Goldstein, a geneticist from the University College London, scientists studied the DNA of 2,000 people. The study shows that the genetic pattern of the Vikings remains in some parts of the UK population and confirms that the Norwegian Vikings did not just raid and then retreat to Scandinavia, but actually settled in Britain.
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