http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/vikings-native-american-woman.htmlThe first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.
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"It was thought at first that (the DNA) came from recently established Asian families in Iceland," CSIC researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox was quoted as saying in a statement by the institute. "But when family genealogy was studied, it was discovered that the four families were descended from ancestors who lived between 1710 and 1740 from the same region of southern Iceland."
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"As the island was virtually isolated from the 10th century, the most likely hypothesis is that these genes corresponded to an Amerindian woman who was brought from America by the Vikings around the year 1000," said Lalueza-Fox.
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I have some serious problems with the guess floated by this article. First, the genes show up in 1710 in Iceland, long after travel between the two continents was normalized. Second, unlike Greenland, Iceland was never "virtually isolated" after it was colonized by Vikings. There was constant visitation by passing ships, so it's much more likely that a Native American sailor showed up between ca. 1500 and 1700. Third, 1710 was just about that time that Denmark began to reassert its authority over Greenland, from which Scandinavians had been missing for hundreds of years, so any "Greenlander" who went to Iceland at that time would almost certainly have been Native American and would therefore be a more likely candidate than a kidnapped chick from 700 years before. Just my opinion, though.
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