People arrived on the Faroe Islands – a North Atlantic archipelago between Iceland, Norway and the British Isles – earlier than we thought, predating the arrival of Norse Vikings by about 300 years.
The earliest direct evidence of human settlement on the Faroe Islands dates back to the arrival of the Vikings in around AD 800. But charred barley grains and cereal grain pollen on the islands dating back to around AD 500 indirectly hint that farming must have existed on the islands pre-Viking.
Now, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York and his colleagues have found conclusive evidence that people lived on the Faroe Islands at least three centuries before the Vikings.
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The researchers collected sediment from the bottom of Lake Eiði on Eysturoy, the second largest of the Faroe Islands. Analysis of the sediment revealed traces of sheep DNA, which they dated to between AD 470 and 610. They also found evidence of faecal matter from livestock in the sediment, dated to around AD 550. “The only way sheep could get to the Faroes is that if people brought them,” says D’Andrea.
In addition, they discovered an increase in the amount of DNA of grass-like plants in the sediment dating back to a similar period. This indicates that plant communities were changing in response to the grazing pressure of the livestock, says D’Andrea.
“These pieces of evidence together are really definitive – the Faroe Islands were occupied centuries earlier than the earliest dated Norse archaeological sites,” he says.
The researchers speculate that these early settlers may have come from the British Isles. This is because the maternal lineage of modern Faroese people is largely from the British Isles, according to DNA analysis of the population from a . It is also unclear if the Norse had the sailing technology to reach the islands as early as AD 500. But we can’t say for sure who the first settlers were, says D’Andrea.
“This research is the final piece of the jigsaw, along with the pollen record and archaeology, that definitively proves pre-Viking human settlement of the Faroes,” says at Durham University, UK. “The question now is: who were they and what type of settlement occurred?”
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