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Vikings in paradise: Were the Norse the first to settle the Azores?

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https://www.science.org/content/article/...tle-azores

EXCERPTS: . . ,. According to a new study of lake sediment cores, however, the Portuguese may not have been the first people to reach the island paradise: Viking seafarers may have arrived some 700 years earlier than de Silves and his crew. Any Vikings were long gone by the time Portuguese sailors arrived, the authors note, but some Norse rodent stowaways may have left a lasting genetic mark on the island.

The paper is a welcome addition to the sparse data on the Azores prehistory, says Jeremy Searle, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University. His team proposed a Norse connection to the island in 2015, based on genetic similarities between Azorean and northern European mice. “To actually have firm data supporting that is obviously pretty gratifying.”

Conclusive archaeological evidence of humans in the Azores is sparse and only dates back to the early 15th century. In recent years, a few studies hinted at even earlier occupation, although it wasn’t clear who these earlier settlers were or when they arrived. [...] The researchers suspected they would find signs of human disturbance—pollen from nonnative crops, spores from fungi that grow on livestock dung—dating back to the early 1400s. And they did.

But the researchers were surprised to find these signals extended even further back in time. In a sedimentary layer dating to between 700 C.E. and 850 C.E. taken from Peixinho Lake on the Azores’s Pico Island [...] A similar signal shows up in cores from Caldeirão Lake on the Azores’s Corvo Island dating to about 100 years later. Pollen from a nonnative ryegrass shows up in layers from Pico Island dating to about 1150, and at 1300 on São Miguel Island, also part of the archipelago.

Taken together, the results suggest humans were occupying and exploiting the natural resources of the Azores at least 700 years earlier than historians have traditionally believed [...] It’s not clear when these earliest human settlers of the Azores disappeared, but the Portuguese sailors who explored the islands in the 1400s described the islands as pristine.

Who were those first ancient mariners? “Our best guess is the Norse,” who were accomplished and adventurous seafarers, Raposeiro says. By as early as 789, there are records of Vikings sailing and plundering up and down the coasts of northern and western Europe.

[...] a mouse from Scandinavia could easily have boarded a ship in what today is Portugal and sailed over to the Azores. “Certainly, it’s possible it was the Norse,” Connor says. “The Vikings were great, great mariners. … But it could have been anyone.” (MORE - missing details)
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