Thread by @HistorywHilbert

I've been fascinated by Greenland's prehistory ever since learning about it in a series of fantastic lectures by Professor Elizabeth Ashman Rowe during my undergraduate.

Upon arrival in the 980s AD, the first Norsemen encountered remains of houses belonging to the Dorset 1/X

Culture, a people who disappeared from the archaeological record in the century before the Scandinavians' arrival.

The ancestors of these first Greenlanders may have entered the island already 4,500 years ago, crossing from Siberia through coastal Alaska and Canada. 2/X

They survived and adapted through climate change that transformed Greenland around the first millennium BC, learning to hunt on sea-ice without bows or kayaks.

On land they caught waterfowl for their meat and for the down of Cuddy Ducks -Eiderdown outside Northumbria. 3/X

The polar bear loomed large for the Dorset in many ways. Lifelike figurines of standing, swimming, and perhaps flying bears are some of the most enigmatic relics left behind by the Dorset.

From flaming meteors that crashed into the Arctic snowscape they foraged telluric iron 4/X

for harpoon points, and elsewhere utilised copper, sometimes trading over vast distances with other Dorset spread out across the Arctic to acquire it. 5/X

Today, the Dorset have melted away into history like glacial ice. Neither the arrival of the Norse, nor the Thule (ancestors of the modern Greenlandic Inuit) appear to have been the cause of their demise. 6/X

Some Inuit traditions record an older population in Kalaallit Nunaat, who were sometimes amicable and sometimes hostile. Norse sources are also largely silent on the 'skrælingjar' of Grænlend.

Archaeological evidence shows a hiatus between Dorset and Thule settlements with.. 7/X

no overlap.

Modern (Inuit) Greenlanders do not share DNA with the Dorset. In fact, in the maternal line no Dorset DNA can be found among modern Inuit anywhere in the Arctic. 8/X

The archaeology suggests the Dorset were gone before the Thule arrived and weren't displaced. 8/X

So what did happen? Where did they go?

Perhaps the Dorset's wide-flung connectedness was their downfall. An epidemic perhaps, or simultaneous hunting failures could explain the collapse of the relatively lightly-populated Dorset communities around the Arctic. 9/X

If a key nodal settlement was abandoned, whole stretches of coastal habitation may have become isolated. Perhaps the Norse witnessed the last vestiges of the millennia-spanning Dorset habitation of Greenland, or perhaps they could only wonder at the skeletons of... 10/X

structures they left in their wake.

And so can we.

Take a moment to reflect on its "pre-history", on the sea-ice-hunters, the bear-carvers, and the monument builders of the Dorset.

'History of Greenland' video coming soon. Thanks for reading. 11/END