Iceland Origin

The Icelanders are a Germanic ethnic group from Iceland that descended from Norsemen of Scandinavia and Celts from Scotland and Ireland. Icelandic is the official language and it is believed to have changed very little from the original tongue spoken by the Norse settlers. The recorded history of Iceland began with the settlement by Viking explorers. Historical and DNA records indicate that approximately 60 percent of the settlers were of Norse origin (primarily from Western Norway) and the rest were from the Scottish or Irish Heritage. Iceland was discovered by Vikings around 870 A.D. Archaeological studies show that Iceland had no inhabitants prior to its colonization by Vikings.
The origins of the Icelanders is still rather ambiguous since there is controversy on the fact that not all of the settlers originated from Scandinavia; there are several …show more content…
They tested mitochondrial DNA variation of the Icelanders and compared the primary data from published sources from 26 European populations. The data demonstrated that the Icelanders are among the most genetically heterogeneous Europeans based upon by the mean number of nucleotide differences as well as by the estimates of O parameters of the neutral theory. The distribution of pairwise differences in general has the same shape as other European lineages and shows no evidence of bottlenecks of numbers in the Icelanders Arnason (2003). Evidence shows that variation of mtDNA proves that the Icelandic mitochondrial DNA gene pool contains comparatively fewer distinct lineages than most other European populations. This data also implies the same reasoning as of the research team at The Institute of Biological Anthropology at University of Oxford that because there is a small population size genetic drift and the founder effects may have had a significant impact on the Icelandic gene