DNA Evidence Reveals Skeleton From 100 Year Old Viking Tomb Was Female Warrior

Unbelievable that we are just getting around now to cleaning up some 19th century GARBAGE conclusions about who was buried in important tombs and why.  We may catch up with it in, oh - say, 100 or so years.  By that time, the conclusions we've reached on some will STILL be proven to have been wrong, because women have always been a force to be reckoned with in the REAL world, whether you want to recognize that or not.  If you think I'm joking about not being recognized as such, please key in on some of the "experts'" comments made in the article! U N B E L I E V A B L E !

From The Washington Post:

Wonder Woman lived: Viking warrior skeleton identified as female, 128 years after its discovery

September 14, 2017, by Amy Ellis Nutt

An 1889 drawing of the Viking warrior grave discovered in Birka, Sweden. For more than 120 years, it was assumed to be the skeleton of a man. (Hjalmar Stolpe)

For more than a century after it was found, a skeleton ensconced in a Viking grave, surrounded by military weapons, was assumed to be that of a battle-hardened man. No more.

The warrior was, in fact, female. And not just any female, but a Viking warrior woman, a shieldmaiden, like the ancient Brienne of Tarth from “Game of Thrones."

The artifacts entombed with the 1,000-year-old bones and unearthed in 1889 in Birka, Sweden, included two shields, a sword, an ax, a spear, armor-piercing arrows and a battle knife — not to mention the remnants of two horses. Such weapons of war among grave goods, archaeologists long assumed, meant the Viking had been male.

Yet modern-day genetics testing on the DNA extracted from a tooth and an arm bone has confirmed otherwise. The skeleton, known as Bj 581, belonged to someone with two X chromosomes.

"We were blinded by the warrior equipment,” one of the researchers, Anders Gotherstrom, said in an email to The Washington Post this week. “The grave-goods shout 'warrior' at you, and nothing else.

A modern drawing of the same Viking grave, this time depicting the female warrior. (Neil Price)

Gotherstrom, along with nine other scientists from Stockholm and Uppsala universities, announced their results in a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Theirs is the first genetic proof that at least some Viking women were warriors.

True Beauty is Timeless

Ahhhhhh, amore!  I've been thinking about that a lot, lately.  Perhaps I am getting overly sentimental in my old age?  Now piano concertos make me cry -- Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23, 2. Adagio; Chopin Spring Waltz (Mariage d'Amour); Rachmaninov no. 2 Opus Moderato Allegro; the waltz scene from the 2014 French version of "Beauty and the Beast," La Belle et le Bete.

Just dropping in for a short visit, things are super busy here this autumn and I haven't had time to do ANYTHING on the blog.  I was, though, this morning going through my Youtube "History" and came across this wonderful advertisement clip I saved for a perfume, featuring the ever-beautiful Sophia Loren.  It's fabulous, dahlings!