Iceland’s founding fathers underwent a rapid, 1000-year genetic shift

[rangerrebew]

Iceland’s founding fathers underwent a rapid, 1000-year genetic shift

By Michael PriceMay. 31, 2018 , 2:00 PM

If modern Icelanders came face-to-face with their founding fathers, they’d be hard-pressed to see much family resemblance, according to a new study. That’s because today’s Icelanders have a much higher proportion of Scandinavian genes than their distant ancestors did, suggesting the islanders underwent a remarkably rapid genetic shift over the past thousand years.

Previous studies have hinted as much based on inferences from modern genotypes, notes Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who wasn’t involved in the work. But the new findings offer a rare, direct glimpse of the founding of a new people. “I don’t think this has been shown before in any human population.”

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/iceland-s-founding-fathers-underwent-rapid-1000-year-genetic-shift

[sneakypete]

Why is it surprising they got a lot of their more modern genes from the island and culture closest to them? It ain't like people 500 + years ago just hopped on a jet and flew there. Most of the people in Europe 500 + years ago didn't even know that Iceland existed.

What am I missing?