Picture…The Vikings! Images of seafaring men striking out in small wooden ships … the first to colonize lands of the far north. But wait! They might not have been the first to arrive to the Faroe Islands, which lie between Norway and Iceland! A recent study weaves together evidence from genetics, isotopes, and the pollen record to suggest that other people arrived there... long, long before the Vikings.
Lorelei Curtin is an earth and environmental scientist at the University of Wyoming. She carried out this study at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.