Early peopling of Iceland

Honestly surviving volcanic eruptions on Iceland aren’t that hard, yes the aftermath decimate the population, as it poison the land based food chain, but a significant part of the population will almost certainly survive.

A interesting aspect of this settlement are founder effect. The Ireland and Scotland are known fair having the highest percent of redheads, a mix of founder effect, selection (red hair likely served as alternative to the selection toward blond hair we saw around the Baltic among agricultural people[1]), small population and pure chance could result in the population being fully red haired.

[1] blond and red hair are connected to pale skin, which are a benefit for agricultural people at high latitude.
OK. So volcano is not going to kill Icelanders. We could stick with Bronze Age settlers. Red hair and pale skin gives advantage for high lattitude farmers, although founder effect is likely to po bigger role there-Icelanders would be mostly meat/milk/fish eating. Such diet would provide them with enough vitamin D.
 
OK. So volcano is not going to kill Icelanders. We could stick with Bronze Age settlers. Red hair and pale skin gives advantage for high lattitude farmers, although founder effect is likely to po bigger role there-Icelanders would be mostly meat/milk/fish eating. Such diet would provide them with enough vitamin D.

That does not appear to matter in terms of the selection for White skin, so they will likely be pale. Red headed I don’t know about. I guess if they experience a severe genetic bottleneck due to the volcanic eruptions, this could happen. Red hair is significantly more common among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jess than it is among other Semitic peoples due to their genetic bottleneck.
 
Iceland was, alongside Madagascar and New Zealand, one of the last large landmasses settled by humans. In the case of Madagascar it is theory, that first people came there by accident:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/science-and-technology/2012/03/24/thirty-lost-souls
That makes me wonder: could humans get to iceland much earlier as result of some storm taking their boat to the open sea, and then with extreme amount of luck their drifting boat makes it to Iceland? Even more luckily-there happened to be women on the boat, so survivors of that unlikely journey could start new population on the Island? Say such event happens around 5-6 kya and settlers came from British Isles (perhaps they're first farmers trying to get to Orkneys or Hebrides). Is it possible, that isolated population of hunter-gatherers (farmers would not be prosperous there) would emerge on Iceland as result and survive until contact with Celts/Normans (or their analogues)?
Maybe Basque fishermen/ whalers.
 
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