It is difficult to overstate the impact of ancient DNA on multiple scientific fields. Since the 1980s, the explosion of research into ancient DNA has positively impacted the fields of genetics, biology, archaeology, palaeontology – just to name a few areas of scientific enquiry.

Ancient DNA – any DNA that is over fifty years old – is brittle and can be difficult to preserve. Extracting ancient DNA from fossils is a painstaking and meticulous process, but one that yields significant results for scientific investigators. It has provided insights into the genetic heritage of modern day ethnic groups, as well as revealing information about human migration patterns.

Let’s start with a basic question that illustrates the diverse impact of ancient DNA. What image comes to mind with the mention of the word Vikings? The stereotype is that of tall, blonde, fair-skinned marauding warriors in horned helmets. While there is an element of truth to that image, the reality is far more complex. Vikings does not refer to an ethnicity or race, but a job description, similarly to the word pirate.

Indeed, the Vikings were not the pure white master race of all-conquering giants as the white supremacists of today would have us believe. Ancient DNA has revealed a surprisingly different reality from the one bequeathed to us in stereotypes. The Vikings were an ethnically mixed society of people, and they traded and intermingled with the peoples they interacted with much more than we have been led to believe.

In new research into the ancient DNA – from Viking skeletons – archaeologists and historians have hit upon a conclusion they have long suspected. The Vikings were a mishmash of genetic materials from across Europe and the lands they conquered. Southern and Eastern European genes were included in the Viking admixture, and their increasing scope of conquest meant further diversification of their genetic makeup. The Viking society did not always equate with purely Norse Scandinavian ancestry.

Viking occupants of what are today Denmark and coastal Sweden shared more DNA with Anatolian people, rather than with the residents of inland Scandinavia. Trading with Constantinople as the first stop, the Vikings found that city as a stepping stone for interactions with peoples from the Islamic and Asiatic East.

The Vikings actually traded with the Islamic empire, and sent emissaries and traders to venture along the Silk Routes, an interconnected network of trade roads connecting China to the Islamic work and the West. It was the mercantile superhighway of its times.

Close encounters of the medieval kind are not the only insights garnered from ancient DNA.

We have all been taught that Homo sapiens, migrating out of Africa, went on to conquer the world. This is an appealing story of triumphant progress, but it is also misleading. Over the last few decades, we are steadily discovering that ours is only one of several ancestral hominin species – and humans have interbreed with Neanderthals, Denisovans and others.

We like to think of human prehistory as one of raw and unbridled competition, where humans ultimately triumphed in a hominin gladiatorial Thunderdome. Outcompeting ostensibly weaker rival hominins appeals to our hypercompetitive capitalist ethos, where (supposedly) only the most efficient and competitive entrepreneurs survive and flourish, while all others fall into oblivion as a result of their own inadequacies.

Actually, intermixing and interbreeding were just as important, and ancient DNA is providing insights into this topic.

Humans shared the world, the resources and genes, with hominin cousins, the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other types of extinct hominin species.

The human story is not just that of migrations, wars, conquest and cultural assimilation. As people have travelled, so have words, languages and syntax. What has this got to do with ancient DNA?

Well, ancient DNA is helping to solve a longstanding linguistic mystery; the origins of Europe’s Uralic language speakers. The Uralic language group includes Estonian, Hungarian and Finnish. These languages are quite distinct from Slavic. How did they end up in Eastern Europe?

While Indo-European languages were brought by mass migration and invasions, the Uralic languages spread in a more cautious, step-by-step way. Investigators have tracked the movement of Uralic speakers across northern Asia and Europe, originating in a region of Siberian Russia called Yakutia.

Closer to Alaska, Yakutia is a vast expanse of boreal forest in northeastern Siberia. The genetic markers of Uralic speakers have been found in Yakut populations, and these speakers spread throughout the taiga forest, all the way to the Baltic and Hungarian Europe.

The importance of ancient DNA lies not just in the sophistication of the scientific techniques used to extract it from fossils and preserve it. It lies in the collaborative approach among biologists, geneticists and archaeologists towards resolving persistent problems in science.