British or Irish beat Vikings to Faroe Islands?

[Kyng]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59683287

People from Britain or Ireland may have reached the remote Faroe Islands before the Vikings, according to new evidence.

Historically, the North Atlantic archipelago was part of the Viking world and its inhabitants speak a language derived from Old Norse.

Now, evidence has emerged that people reached the island by 500 AD - some 350 years before Scandinavians arrived.

This early settlement pre-dates the adoption of long-distance sailing technology by the Vikings.

Researchers found fragments of sheep DNA and chemical residues of sheep faeces in lake sediments on the Faroese island of Eysturoy. These were assigned an age using scientific dating techniques. Livestock could only have reached the remote archipelago if they were taken there by humans on boats.

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Pretty surprising if true: after all, the Faroe Islands are about as far from Great Britain as they are from Scandinavia (and they're even further from Ireland!)

It makes me wonder what these British or Irish people were doing going that far north... and whether they could have started a "Viking Age" of their own if they'd sailed more widely .