Scandinavia's Mysterious Prehistory - Nordic Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age

00:00 - Introduction
01:53 - The Neolithic
02:45 - The Bronze Age
06:30 - The Bronze Age Collapse
07:39 - The Iron Age
09:17 - The Migrations Period and the Goths
09:52 - Closing Thoughts
From impossibly large grave mounds to mystical rock art and bronze masterworks, lets sit down and have a look at some key times and places from prehistory, in the less well-known if fascinating ancient Scandinavia before the vikings.
Stills from 'Vikings' (History Channel), 'The Last Kingdom' (BBC) and 'The Norsemen' (NRK) used for commentary and fair use.
A few photos are of the University of Oslo's own archaeological collection of stone age artefacts.
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#scandinavia #stoneage #bronzeage #ironage #norway

[@susanshine5930]

This is really exciting to me, as I was adopted as a baby. My daughter found my birth family. I took a DNA test the results revealed that I am 48% Scandian with the concentration on Norway. So, am I seeing the history of my people? I believe I am! This is a part of me that I never ever suspected!! Thank you for sharing this!!!

[@chads2562]

Greetings from the U.S. northland Minnesota. Thankyou for interesting and well done video. You have rekindled the fascination of my ancestral norse history. SKOAL!

[@Herrebaaen]

SKÅL 😁

[@osgabriel20]

I don’t believe justice is being given to Nordic Cultures and the unfortunate depiction that they are barbaric is not true, no culture is barbaric when you leave such great artifacts. Thank you

[@veronicalogotheti1162]

What culture To be raiding

[@dusty82k20]

My great grandparents migrated from Norway in the late 1800’s. I have always had a desire to learn more about my Scandinavian heritage. Hopefully I can travel there before my time on this earth ends. Thank you very much for your hard work to tell this little known history .

[@soderlund3610]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJnMhpSZfN98nZo

[@pipkin5287]

You're not the only one who doesn't mind the commercial attention (TV series, games, books, etc.) of our Scandinavian culture, but would sincerely wish that more information of actual historical value was made more widely popular. I mean, I can read material in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish just fine (which we have a lot of), but more information in English would be great for reaching a wider audience. I often feel like people I talk to outside of Scandinavia don't really get any info aside from the commercial stuff to reference our older cultures. Thank you for the great work!

[@LePetitChatNoir79]

I’m enjoying binge-watching your channel. You really make it fun and interesting!

[@stevenschilizzi4104]

Excellent video. I totally agree: this period of nordic (pre)history really deserves more attention. I wonder how much archaeological work is going on these days that might shed more light. I recently was in Alta in Finnmark, northern Norway, on the Arctic Ocean, and was astonished to see such elaborate rock art near the museum facing the sea, which was about 7000 years old, if I remember right. There was lots going on even at the extreme north of Scandinavia! It would be really worth finding out more about who these people were. Takk igjen før en så bra jobb! I hope to hear more from you soon.

[@NorthernHistory]

Im driving up to Nordland next week, hope to catch some rock art on the way.

[@zicada7661]

Undervurderert video! Tydelig du la mye tid i denne. Håper du får tid til flere videoer i fremtiden!

[@taybak8446]

Very informative and also well presented. As a lover of Nordic prehistory I searched for about 1 hour and was very satisfied to find your video. I hope one day to visit Vestfold and other areas of Norway to see the Nordic Bronze Age sites. I think Viking history has been done to death by popular media and am not so interested in that period as I used to be when I was 9-12 years old. Cheers!

[@NorthernHistory]

Thank you! I agree. Looking at it now; I am only scratching the surface. There's a lot more to say about the Nordic bronze age. Perhaps the topic of another video.

[@dmytrokiosak3735]

So cool. Thank you

[@NorthernHistory]

Thanks! :)

[@Diddiwehy]

Fantastisk video, videoen din går vældi dypt itj berr i historien, men også på enkelmenneskan i dæm tidsperiodan. Takk for å lag denne videoen om temaer som desverre itj blir snakka my på skuln.

[@johngavin1175]

I myself just started being interested in pre Viking Scandinavia. Mainly because it's the place where the Germanic languages spread from,as a development of the Battle axe culture,who were from the Corded Ware,who themselves were derived from the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya spread the Indo European languages,including the last common ancestor of all Germanic languages. Good vid dude,I subscribed. Horns up! Gonna fire up some Enslaved and old Amon Amarth...Hails from Florida!

[@leonuswxd]

Good video, thanks

[@NorthernHistory]

What would you like to see next? More modern history from Norway? Or prehistoric/medieval?

[@81danibell]

NorthernHistory prehistoric/medieval is my favorite, but good stories from any time are interesting

[@NorthernHistory]

@@81danibell Prehistoric episode nr 4 coming up! :)

[@TheRick8866]

Not sure if it’s been done but a video on the yamna and the eventual corded ware and the modern Scandinavian

[@missymaleng9385]

Pre historic and medieval

[@marvinmartion1178]

Prehistoric! More Neolithic and earlier!

[@baqaqipekhebi7148]

Bravo!👍

[@Powersnufkin]

jeg likte videoen. Kjempebra jobbet! Tor vigi

[@mermory5071]

That is so interesting I want to know more about the Bronze age

[@finnsaarinen3471]

amazing!!!!!!!!!

[@Swanoaks]

I was born in New Zealand at the bottom of the world. But now living in Virginia USA. I had three English grandparents and one Danish grandfather all who arrived in the mid 18th century. But my DNA carries 71% Scandinavian, 21.3% Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, and only 7.7% English. I became very interested in finding out how this mix came about. The more I learn about how and where man came from, and the spread of the human race, the more it is all becoming clear. Scandinavians werent the only barbaric cultures, our native Maori people in New Zealand were known to be cannibals, not that long ago. Understandable when one understands how they lived. Today they are the most amazing people. In am really enjoying your blogs here.

[@Nembula]

I would very much enjoy anything you can find on Sandby Borg. Last I was able to understand, they had excavated about 10% of the fort and found 14 bodies. They stopped providing English translation etc.

[@ScottJB]

I'm in Denmark right now, and I can't stop obsessing over the bronze and iron age sites and museums. Like many here, I'm an American of roughly half Scandi (Danish) ancestry. Our roots speak out to us if we listen.

[@NorthernHistory]

Denmark has awesome museums. Enjoy.

[@DJS11811]

Keep going on the Pre gistory.

[@Yvonne2214]

I've always felt too much emphasis was placed on religious purposes of Neolithic and early bronze age art. Not to say that it was art for art's sake, but possibly more as a precursor to written language. Depictions as an educational tool for the elders to pass on useful information regarding herd migration and other things needed to continue the survival of the tribe. There are quite a few cases of early written texts being surprisingly mundane once translated. Often they were the equivalent of modern day receipts. After all regardless of how important the afterlife may have been to past cultures, survival of our offspring would have been equally if not more important. A different kind of afterlife of sorts.

[@jmaaybraak]

Indeed. Quite thought-provoking, that bit. Well said.

From the stars. Planets in Centauri 4 light years away. ET. I know where they are here in Scandinavia but youtube is forbidding me to show the pictures. True!!!!!

[@jotto76]

Bra jobba! Men det er noe rart med KZbin, siden jeg plutselig ikke får tilgang til kanalen din... ?

[@NorthernHistory]

Takk! Jeg tror det var et problem med hele KZbin igår.

[@garychynne1377]

interesting

Godess Hel was their godess. But the ET are coming and going via a portal. in Norway not far from Östersund a very old center with the Frösön Island.

[@henkstersmacro-world]

👍👍👍

[@serdargenc34]

Were there a direct migration of the Celts to Scandinavia? Or did the Scandinavians learn blacksmithing from continental Germenic people

[@NorthernHistory]

Great question. I wish I knew the answer! The transmission of knowledge is notoriously difficult to map.

[@serdargenc34]

@@NorthernHistory thank you. You are right, it was a tough question. Unfortunately there is still a lot in Scandinavian history behind the fog

[@dirksharp9876]

They had bronze axes in the Corded Ware/Neolithic dagger period. As far as those Mycenaean style rapiers and famous scimitar -type swords, those seem to have been introduced by a culture called the Single Grave Culture. The SGC culture was either directly descended from the very influential Unetice Culture, or a very similar culture nearby the Unetice. It is likely this meeting of the Single Grave Culture and the native Scandinavians of the time was the event referred to in the mythological Aesir-Vanir war. Any this meeting and converging of populations is the ethnogenesis of the Germanic people. As stated in the video, for the early Germanics the Celts were more of an influence on Scandinavia after the bronze age, in the Jastorf period and through the ages there was likely a great deal of cultural exchange.

[@SG-js2qn]

People have been living all around the Baltic since 10,000 BC. But officially all Europeans seem to care about is the Baltic after Christianity arrived. I am a person interested in prehistory, but everywhere you find resources saying this city or that people began in the Middle Ages. It's slowly getting better, but I'd appreciate it if the bias would be completely and thoroughly dumped.

[@michaeliverson4060]

In many ways, its an unfortunate side effect of illiterate cultures everywhere: we can't hear their history and ideas. What we know of the Gauls is what the Romans wrote about them, which is a bit one sided. After Rome fell, the church, which was one of the only literate parts of society in the post Roman era, didn't help much either, as what they encountered was heretical to their outlook. Bones and pottery can only tell so much, unfortunately.

[@SG-js2qn]

@@michaeliverson4060 Yes, I know we have ignorance due to lack of written records, but I'll commonly find an assertion that life began in this community or that when a church showed up, and I'm like, no, people have been living there for thousands of years. It's not true to say that the city or whatever started when the church showed up. What showed up for the first time were written records, that's all.

[@dreddykrugernew]

@@SG-js2qn your better off watching DNA studies because they tell you who they are and a lot of the time they tell you what they where buried with and what their lifestyle was like. But what you are seeking is lost history, its lost in time because what was written about them was very little or nothing so you have to rely on genetics and archaeology of which there wont be a lot because Eastern European countries are not very wealthy and dont have huge archaeological departments and hundreds of people becoming qualified archaeologists every year. There is a program on KZbin off British TV called Time Team, it has hundreds if not thousands of episodes on British and some foreign archaeology. Much like the rest of Europe Anatolian farmers spread west, but their reign was short lived by the influx of the Yamnaya, we know they mastered the horse and metallurgy, genetics videos tell you the most history but here is a video i watched recently and the dates are interesting because its at the same time as the cities of Sumeria, its these people who are your ancestors who travelled west and settled around the Baltic... kzbin.info/www/bejne/eJyVgpWcZr6EmKs

[@SG-js2qn]

@@dreddykrugernew Yes, I am seeking lost or insufficiently regarded history. My complaint, though, is that there's a common tendency to just bury the pre-Christian past for no particular reason. I live in the US, and in my particular area the city's story doesn't begin with the arrival of Spanish missionaries or pioneers in covered wagons, but with the native populations that are the oldest we know of. It IS possible to reference the known history of a region before the current civilization. I wish this doctrine would be followed in more places. It's as if you counted Jericho as being founded with the formation of the Palestinian National Authority. Or Byblos being founded in the 16th century with the Ottoman conquest.

[@OmmerSyssel]

@@SG-js2qn It seems like your level of ignorance is the standard for everyone else? Try accept that Europe is a totally different culture than your superficial nation. Bronze Age is very well researched and documented period thorough Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Lots of science is published. Have fun with a reality, outside conspiracies and Disney

[@wl7293]

thanks and onward through the fog

[@kennethkarlsson6796]

I live here

[@waltonsmith7210]

Spiritual does not automatically mean New Age

[@theslayer1652]

Romans actually gave northern german/danish chiefs weapons and shields for some reason it's actually kinda weird

[@NorthernHistory]

Probably forging alliances.

[@nathanpattee1629]

The video was well done. But I'm disappointed that you didn't spend much time on the neolithic funnel beaker nordic farmers. There are many many videos on the bronze and iron age indo Europeans people . But not much on the funnel beaker nordic peoples.

[@NorthernHistory]

Thanks Nathan. I will be making a more in-depth video on the nordic neolithic in the future. The subject fascinates me.

[@nathanpattee1629]

@@NorthernHistory awsome! I am looking forward to seeing it!

[@scottanderson7239]

I'm not for sure about other people I was able to trace my family tree 30,000 years to Scandinavian.

[@dreddykrugernew]

Keep dreaming, considering the last ice age was in full effect 30,000 years ago and Scandinavia was under ice id love to know how you came to this conclusion. People only migrated up there 10,000 years ago and they where the Eastern European hunter gatherers (EHG's) and then they met up with some Western European Hunter Gatherers, or they already had WHG's DNA. They then mixed with some Anatolian Neolithic farmers around 6500 years ago then came the big influx of the Steppe people called the Yamnaya around 5500 years ago. So lets get this straight, in order for Scandinavians to be classed as Scandinavian they must have a mix of all these people, otherwise they are still their own distinct people, when these people come together and their genetics diverge and because of their lifestyles and environment that's what forces evolutionary changes on a genetic level so they are classed as something different. You dont know enough about history or genetics...

[@scottanderson7239]

@@dreddykrugernew Edit "Last glacial" redirects here. For the period of maximum glacier extent during this time, see Last Glacial Maximum. The Last Glacial Period (LGP) occurred from the end of the Eemian to the end of the Younger Dryas, encompassing the period c. 115,000 - c. 11,700 years ago. The LGP is part of a larger sequence of glacial and interglacial periods known as the Quaternary glaciation which started around 2,588,000 years ago and is ongoing.[1] The definition of the Quaternary as beginning 2.58 million years ago is based on the formation of the Arctic ice cap. The Antarctic ice sheet began to form earlier, at about 34 Ma, in the mid-Cenozoic (Eocene-Oligocene extinction event). The term Late Cenozoic Ice Age is used to include this early phase.[2] en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

[@scottanderson7239]

@@dreddykrugernew I took two different DNA tests that gave me DNA 30,000 years history of my family tree

[@dreddykrugernew]

@@scottanderson7239 the glacial maximum was around 24,000 years ago but we entered that ice age 40,000 years ago. Also the people who where around 30,000 years ago are far different people than today, they are true hybrids of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens and had huge bodies and huge heads and it is around 30,000 years ago when geneticists say we evolved into modern humans. Also with the Pitted Ware culture and the Battle Axe culture, it wasnt until these 2 people eventually merged that Scandinavians where created with the I1a haplogroup, which was the Pitted Ware hunter gatherer people with the Battle Axe people dominated by R1a and R1b haplogroups and this happened around 4300 years ago. The old giant people evolved again with the Younger Dryas impact and our bodies became much smaller and our heads also shrank considerably after this event. Who knows what was the capabilities of these people with huge head to body ratio, because head size comparable to body size directly relates to intelligence, with the Homo Sapiens with the biggest head to body ratio being the most intelligent...

[@scottanderson7239]

@@dreddykrugernew I have already done my research on Germania I'm quite aware of where germanium start and where they are today I was just making a comment about my family history I was not motivated to start a dispute or argument if you have any more to say I have other things I can be doing like trying to find the energy to get back up and replace my LED light strips on my tricycle bicycle hybrid.

[@chriscodrington5464]

Marine ivory was forgotten....

[@veronicalogotheti1162]

Julio cesar made the bridge And took it Till here he said

[@gunaywerner2677]

THERE'S A VILLAGE IN TURKEY "GÖBEKLİ TEPE" 12.000 YEARS OLD GOOD PRESERVED 🇹🇷A TURKISH LADY

[@sosco22]

There were bears.

[@veronicalogotheti1162]

Franks were with romans frigians

and why couldn't they just be interested in the nature that surrounded them, stars and planets and such and no fairy tale? if you don't have greek natural philosophers to steal all the terms from and not yet invented a _precise_ scientific method yet, and aren't a moron, you would come up with a pre-scientific method all on your own. you would have to come up with a system of terms to reason about things and processes, not yet understood. also those apprentices get a lot more useful, if you find a way, not having them to run in every dead-end, each and every error that has been made before, those terms come in handy to. when family, society, ̶t̶a̶x̶ ̶e̶v̶a̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶s̶c̶h̶e̶m̶e̶s̶... is the topic which demands reasoning. so how about something, like symbolise bye choosing properties of well known animals, plants, types of stone..., or lets say a set of stereotype people, that pretty much match you average neighbourhood grill party folk, for description, since everybody knows, what they are like. every culture with an alegoric pantheon, or some sort of shamanism, either told us, or even wrote it down for us. that does not mean that there wasn't your usual share of superstitious people. also rituals can give motivation and trust, for endeavors planned, or lived through, by individuals and groups alike. the 'why am i/are we doing it part' of cause would have to be symbolic to.

[@NorthernHistory]

yes.

[@veronicalogotheti1162]

The germanics were with the romans many Alariko came from the east Scandinavia is not germanic