This is damn interesting.

Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanoes,

an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map.

Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the ninth century

and has seen little additional in-migration since.

Even today, more than 90% of Iceland's 390,000 residents can trace their ancestry back to

the earliest permanent inhabitants, a Nordic Celtic mix.

The tradition of the Norse sagas lives on in the form of careful record-keeping about ancestry

and a national passion for genealogy. In other words, it is not the place to stumble upon old

family mysteries. But growing up in the capital city of Reykjavik in the 1950s,

neurologist Dr. Kari Steffinson heard stories that left him curious.

Stephenson's father had come from Dupvigur, an eastern coastal town where everyone still spoke

of a black man who had moved there early in the 19th century.

Hans Jonathan, they called him, a well-liked shopkeeper who had arrived on a ship,

married a spirited woman from a local farm, and become a revered member of the community.

The local census did record a man by the name of Hans Jonathan, born in the Caribbean, who was working at the general

store in Dupvigur in the 19th century. But that was all. No images of the man had survived,

and his time in Iceland was well before any other humans with African ancestry are known to have

visited the island. If tiny remote Dioopvigur did have a black man

arrive in the 19th century, the circumstances

must have been unusual indeed.

It was an intriguing puzzle and solid grounds

...