Erling Haaland and the Giants of the Viking Age

Erling Haaland is 1.95 metres tall. He is Norwegian, built like a centre-back and fast enough to make the comparison feel unfair. If you wanted a living prop for the old image of the towering Viking, football could hardly have supplied a better one.

But Haaland is a warm-up, not evidence. One exceptional athlete cannot tell us the average height of people living a thousand years ago. Even skeletons do not give a simple answer: adult stature reflects genes, sex, nutrition, childhood disease and living conditions. Ancient DNA lets us ask a narrower and scientifically cleaner question: did Viking-age people carry more height-increasing alleles than their neighbours?

Below the paywall, I bring together 484 ancient genomes to test the legend properly. Which group scored highest: the Vikings, Anglo-Saxon-period Norfolk, early-medieval Lower Saxony, Groningen—or somewhere else? Did Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic Vikings differ? How much of the pattern tracks Steppe and other ancestries, and does the same geography still appear in modern Europe? The answer is more interesting than a simple north–south divide.