Apparently the Americas were first discovered by muslim explorers :)

Borachio said:

Well then, a person who went "viking" should be a "viker".

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Viking means "overseas expedition" in Old Norse. The runes would mention fara í víking, or "to go on an expedition".

Ew. We're getting awfully close to the whole "Whigs" and "Tories" business.

Close, but no cigar.

Towards the end of Charles II's reign (1660–85) there was some debate about whether or not his brother, James, Duke of York, should be allowed to succeed to the throne. 'Whigs', originally a reference to Scottish cattle-drivers (stereotypically radical anti-Catholic Covenanters), was the abusive term directed at those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. Those who were not prepared to exclude James were labelled 'Abhorrers' and later 'Tories'. Titus Oates applied the term "Tory," which then signified an Irish robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish plot, and the name gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy with the Catholic Duke of York

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I'm not proud.

Warpus if your family was from Polish north-eastern borderlands then you might have some ancestor listed here:

http://www.mem.net.pl/stg/nazwiska.htm

And I found my maternal grandmother's ancestors (most likely them) in this late 18th century register:

http://www.odessa3.org/collections/land/wprussia/

I also found a Late Medieval (14th century) knight from whom the surname originates.

warpus said:

You're Polish, chances are you won't find anything. My family's history is very unclear beyond my great-grandparents due to all the wars and all the destruction, migrations, etc.. So I have no choice but to assume that I am a Polish prince of some sort, probably related to the Polish Christopher Columbusz.

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All hail Prince Warpus.

Tolni said:

Are you a wealthy Polish prince? Invest in Caribbean colonies now!

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Invest in Eastern Polish Bermuda NOW!

50% better than British West Bermuda! Literally no English food in Eastern Polish Bermuda! It can be all yours for 10 regular payments over PayPal worth over 1000 dollars! Very lucrative!

Buy all these islands and then incorporate them into the Rzeczpospolita:

http://www.privateislandsonline.com/

They can be the autonomous principality of Warpusistan, within Poland.

I prefer having a tax haven all to my self, thank you.

Negotiate the terms of incorporation with the government then.

To attract colonists from Poland proper, Warpusistan can be a tax haven.

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We can have over 146 km2 of jungle for just 6,469,090 British pounds:

http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/ilha-das-pacas

And almost 65 km2: http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/isla-san-pedro

Domen said:

Just tell me how did you research your family records all the way to the Early Middle Ages, I also want to try.

I have not managed to uncover that distant a past of my family so far.

Though I have some traces from the Late Middle Ages.

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It was my grandfather's uncle who did the research.

luiz said:

Viking was sort of an "occupation", not an ethnic or national group. Some Norwegians back in the day might "go Viking", others would not.

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The point is that my ancestors on my paternal grandfather's mother's side were Norwegian. The people in my grandfather's family who weren't Norwegian were Swedish.

That said, between the end of the Viking Age and 1920 there was quite a lot of immigration from European mainland to Scandinavia.

That included for example Slavic settlement and German (from the HRE) immigration. About German immigrants wrote Gucumatz:

Gucumatz said:

I read a book that discussed that immigration [of Germans] had been declining in Scandinavia as well, which is why a royal ordinance [of the Kalmar Union] in the early 1500s was able to be passed which prohibited more than 50% of town councils [in the Kalmar Union] being represented by German peoples (the actual German population was much lower supposedly, but the decline in immigration weakened influence enough to the point where the merchants could no longer stave off that particular ordinance ie).

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So your ancestors lived in Norway & Sweden in ca. 1900, but they could be descendants of - for example - some Bavarian or Westphalian guys.

It is not certain whether your family lived in Scandinavia for all those generations between the 900s and 1900s (that's 1000 years).

Domen, I know more about my family than you do. So as far as I am concerned, this conversation is over.

Valka D'Ur said:

I saw a documentary that speculated that a small band of people had crossed the North Atlantic ice sheet from France to North America. There's no evidence it actually happened, though.

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I might have seen the same show, but I think the docu suggested they followed the edge of the ice shelf. The evidence included similarities in solutrean and clovis (?) spear points, but fishing technologies ringing the N Atlantic dating back ~8-9kya show possible contacts too, so the melting ice sheets may not have entirely stopped people from coming and going. I imagine people were living around the Arctic during the ice age enabling them to travel across the top of the world via land and ice bridges, but it took a while for those contacts to disappear when the ice melted.

Berzerker said:

I might have seen the same show, but I think the docu suggested they followed the edge of the ice shelf. The evidence included similarities in solutrean and clovis (?) spear points, but fishing technologies ringing the N Atlantic dating back ~8-9kya show possible contacts too, so the melting ice sheets may not have entirely stopped people from coming and going. I imagine people were living around the Arctic during the ice age enabling them to travel across the top of the world via land and ice bridges, but it took a while for those contacts to disappear when the ice melted.

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Evidence included also mitochondrial haplogroup X (widespread in Western Eurasia) among native North Americans.

But this mitochondrial haplogroup is virtually absent among native South Americans.

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Plus (though this is less scientific):

Facial reconstruction of an individual from European Magdalenian Culture (17,000 - 12,000 years ago) compared to Red Cloud:



20th century Slovak guy compared to a Native American guy:



One of reconstructed Cro-Magnon individuals:





Compared to Sitting Bull:



Both of them are also quite similar to Charles Bronson.

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Distribution of mitochondrial haplogroup X among native inhabitants:

They have noses, wrinkles and long hair?

tower of babel

some guy in the Paradox Forums-- stupid quotes by Erdogan said:

Yılmaz Özdil did a round-up of His greatest historical inventions, I'll translate:

"As Romanos Diogenes's soldiers attacked with batteries and round shots, Alparslan's soldiers attacked with the chants of Allah" - on the 1071 Battle of Manzikert, a few hundred years before batteries and round shots became a thing.

"They don't know the history of Istanbul, they wouldn't have the face to speak, you can't travel like Romanos Diogenes with a condensing lens" - Confusing the philosopher Diogenes with the afromentioned Byzantine Emperor; and also forgetting that Diogenes reportedly carried a lantern, not a lens.

"30 years of Suleiman I were spent on the horseback" - Suleiman I was on campaign for only ten years of his life, to fit this time frame, he would be forced to spend twenty more years in the palace on horseback.

"Ankara, the capital of Seljuks" - the capital of Seljuks was Konya, aka Iconium, not Ankara.

"The mountain that gives the Olympics its name is Olimpos at Antalya, the source of the Olympic torch is Çıralı there" - The mountain of Olympus is at Salonica, not Antalya; Olimpos at Antalya is not a mountain but a breeding ground for caretta caretta turles; the Olympic Torch tradition originates from Amsterdam in 1928.

He called the Mediterranean Sea "White Sea", because that's a literal translation from Turkish, even though White Sea is a completely different sea.

"The same way Germans have Goethe, the Spanish have Socrates" - clearly mixing him up with Cervantes.

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The one about Romanos Diogenes and Diogenes the cynic, is awesome!!!

Well at least Spanish have Socrates, that is somewhat a comfort since we had not role in the discovery.

Valka D'Ur said:

Domen, I know more about my family than you do. So as far as I am concerned, this conversation is over.

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But I know quite a lot about Scandinavian interpretations of historical emigrations from and immigrations to their region.

Excerpts from a 2000 essay "Where Are We Going? Attitudes Towards Migrations in Archaeological Thought", by Kerstin Cassel:



However, "Romantic" Scandinavian ideas about them being a "race" that has been evolving in Scandinavia since the Paleolithic, have been debunked by modern genetic research, which shows that there was a population replacement in Scandinavia in the Neolithic period or later (previous population abandoned Scandinavia, which was then repopulated by immigrants from what is now Hungary):

From the 2009 publication by Helen Malmstroem et al.:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/publications/articles/2009/Malmstrom_CB09_PWC_Mod_Scan.pdf

Through analysis of DNA extracted from ancient Scandinavian human remains, we show that people of the Pitted Ware culture were not the direct ancestors of modern Scandinavians (including the Saami people of northern Scandinavia) but are more closely related to contemporary populations of the eastern Baltic region. Our findings support hypotheses arising from archaeological analyses that propose a Neolithic or post-Neolithic population replacement in Scandinavia.

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And thanks to new 2014 discoveries we know that ca. year 5000 BC large part of ancestors of modern Scandinavians lived in what is now Hungary:

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/09/03/008664

Oldest (early Neolithic) sample of I1 haplogroup has been found this year (2014) in Hungary - it is the most common paternal marker in Scandinavia today, and yet it was missing from bones belonging to Neolithic Scandinavians analyzed recently by Lazaridis et al. and Skoglund et al. This suggests that it did not enter Scandinavia until the Neolithic, or later, and confirms what Malmstroem wrote back in 2009.

And that was by no means the last immigration to Scandinavia. Later came first Indo-Europeans as conquerors, and then other IE groups. First Indo-European conquerors brought for example Y-DNA haplogroup R1a, its Norse-specific subclade Z284, to Scandinavia.

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Archaeology & genetics reveals that Scandinavia wasn't always "a factory of tribes", but that it was more often a receiving end - an area to which people immigrated from other regions, mostly from areas to the south and to the east of the Baltic Sea.

The Rurikid Dynasty DNA Project also reveals that "Nordic Germanic" paternal HGs were not present among the dynasty:

Among tested descendants of the Rurikids they identified the following Y-DNA haplogroups (indicating paternal ancestry in direct lineage): N1c1 "Finno-Ugrian-Baltic", R1a (subclades L260 "West Slavic", P278 "West Carpathian", Z92 "East Slavic", M458 "Central European" and Z280 "Balto-Slavic") and I2a1 "Dinaric". [names indicate among whom / in which region a HG is most common]

The surprise (for some people) was total absence among the Rurikid dynasty of typically "Germanic" haplogroups such as I1, R1a Z284 or R1b U106.

Most frequent HG among the Rurikids was N1c1. Less frequent was R1a. The rarest - only present among Princes of Turov and Pinsk - was I2a1.

Modern distribution of N1c1 haplogroup (all of its branches) in Europe:



This haplogroup in Europe is nowadays most frequent among Finno-Ugrian peoples, Balts, East Slavs, Turkic-Tatar ethnic groups in Russia and Swedes. But Swedes got it from assimilation (Swedization) of various Non-Germanic groups.

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Of course it does not prove that Rurik was not a Varangian, but what it proves is that his genetic lineage was not of Swedish origin.

It has been already described in this thread that Vikings were multi-ethnic, even if Scandinavians were most numerous among them.

So Rurik was no more ethnically Swedish than today a family of Muslim immigrants in Sweden is ethnically Swedish.