Public talk: DNA, Bones and the Origin of the Icelanders

Agnar Helgason is an internationally recognised expert in anthropological and population genetics. In this public lecture at Kongshøll, he will explore the origins and genetic history of the Icelandic population.

Iceland was settled some 1,100 years ago, during the Viking Age, approximately a century after the settlement of the Faroe Islands.

This formed part of a wider Norse expansion across much of northwestern Europe, which left a particularly enduring cultural and genetic legacy on the islands of the North Atlantic.

In his lecture, Professor Helgason will present findings from more than 25 years of research focusing on the genetic history of the Icelandic population.

He will explain how genealogical records and genetic data from both modern and ancient Icelanders have been used to shed light on the origins of its first settlers and the subsequent evolutionary history of the population.

Professor Helgason will also demonstrate how advances in ancient DNA sequencing, drawing on genomes recovered from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and elsewhere, have revolutionised our understanding of the history of these populations.

Biography

Agnar Helgason completed his BA and MA degrees in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He subsequently earned an MPhil in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1996 and a D.Phil. (PhD) in the same field from the University of Oxford in 2001.

From 2000 to 2026, Agnar was a leading scientist at deCODE Genetics, and since 2007 he has served as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. He is an internationally recognised authority in anthropological and population genetics, with an outstanding publication record. Of his 123 scientific papers, 70 have been published in leading journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Agnar’s research focuses on understanding how the evolutionary forces of mutation, migration, genetic drift, and natural selection have shaped the gene pool of Icelanders and many other populations.

His work is situated within the broader effort to understand the origins and extent of phenotypic variation among human populations. His research has made major contributions to our understanding of human mutation rates, the use of genealogical data to infer migration patterns, genetic drift, and mating behaviour, as well as the application of ancient DNA to reconstruct the histories of Icelanders and other human populations.

View Agnar´s scientific profile here.