Long-Form/Podcast: Against the odds, a tiny Icelandic town speaks of a local Black ancestor. Geneticists and historians combine forces to uncover the man’s eventful life.

Written by Marisa Brook • Non-Fiction • March 2024

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Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/a-trail-gone-cold/

Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the 9th century, and has seen little additional in-migration since. Even today, more than 90 percent of Iceland’s 390,000 residents can trace their ancestry back to the earliest permanent inhabitants, a Nordic-Celtic mix. The tradition of the Norse sagas lives on in the form of careful record-keeping about ancestry⁠⁠—and a national passion for genealogy.…