Vikings who settled in Iceland more than 1,000 years ago valued their horses so much that the men were buried with their trusty steeds. And DNA analysis of these treasured animals recently proved that the horses consigned to the grave with their manly owners were males, too.
For decades, archaeologists have studied the contents of hundreds of Viking graves in Iceland. Many of these graves also contained the remains of horses that appeared to have been healthy adults when they died.
Because the horses seemed well cared for in life — before they were killed and buried, that is — they were considered to be important to the men whose remains lay nearby. Recently, scientists conducted the first ancient DNA analysis of bones from 19 horses in Viking graves and found that nearly all of the animals were male, a tantalizing clue about vanished Viking culture.
"Since horses are so hard to sex morphologically unless fairly well-preserved, whole skeletons are found, we know very little about the varying roles of male and female horses in the past," Pálsdóttir said.
The scientists turned to ancient DNA, or aDNA, to reveal the sex of the horses, which they were able to accomplish with small quantities of genetic material. They examined 22 horses from 17 sites, and of the 19 horses found in graves, 18 were males. This suggests that male horses were favoured for ritual burial by the Viking noblemen whose graves they shared, Pálsdóttir said in the email.
"The sex ratio and age distribution of the killed horses suggest that there was a well-formed structure behind the rituals, in which the chosen horse acted as symbolic representative," she explained.
"The conscious choice of males was perhaps linked with the characteristics of stallions; virility and aggression could have been a strong symbolic factor," Pálsdóttir added.
In further analysis of their samples, the scientists will compare them with evidence of horses from other Northern European countries dating to the Viking age, Pálsdóttir told Live Science. They hope to find the geographical origins of Viking horses and physical traits such as the horses' colours, she added.