A handful of Icelanders may be descendents of a Native American woman ferried to the island hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus reached the New World.
In a tiny proportion of the country's residents, DNA sequences from cell organelles called mitochondria (mtDNA) resemble those of some Native Americans. Unlike nuclear DNA, mtDNA is inherited only from the mother.
Sigríður Sunna Ebenesersdóttir at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavík and her colleagues traced the sequence variants back to four Icelanders born in the early 1700s. However, genetic differences between them suggest that the mtDNA derived from a woman who arrived in Iceland much earlier — possibly around the time the Vikings started exploring the Americas in about AD 1000. Because Native American populations were decimated after the arrival of the Europeans, the lineage may be missing from contemporary populations. DNA analysis of the remains of ancient Native Americans could provide a more definitive link.
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Anthropology: DNA from across the ocean. Nature 468, 1004–1005 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4681004d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4681004d
