This paper offers a neutral systemic diagnostic of Norse gods and their religion. It treats the religion as a human institution that evolved over centuries, accumulating resources, legitimizing social structures, and eventually being replaced when new political and economic conditions favored Christianity.

Every human being carries a living chronicle of the past. Embedded in the sequence of four chemical bases—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine—that make up our DNA is a record of every migration, every encounter, every mixture that brought our ancestors from the first hominins of Africa to the diverse populations of the present day. But this record is not written in plain language. The science of genetic dating provides the key to decrypting this record.

Known collectively as the Andronovo horizon, these peoples represented one of the most expansive cultural phenomena of the ancient world, their influence reaching from the forests of Siberia to the deserts of Central Asia and the mountain valleys of the Tian Shan.