Close up of a section of the defaced panel titled Grave goods. Grave goods A 2010s study of 664 graves in Sweden found that one of the Vikings buried at Birka was not a cisgender man, as had been assumed. A genetic test revealed no Y chromosome in the individual buried in Grave Bj 581. The skeleton had been assumed male due to being buried with weapons; the individual may have been a woman warrior, a trangender man, or an intersex person. When the results were published, the researchers were accused of mixing up their samples or ignoring an apparently undiscovered second skeleton in the same grave, rather than the individual not being a cisgender man. The discovery challenged assumptions about hypermasculine Viking culture and the notion of a binary based on chromosomes. A photo of a skeleton in a grave is next to it.
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